Small groups that are basically just being organized usually start with mass meetings, and the officers are chosen by almost 100% of the members, because the voters are all the people present at the meetings.

After the group is organized, then it's true that percentage of people voting can be small.

I don't think that ITT/Maemo ever went thru the "we're just getting started, everybody vote" stage.

The correct procedure from a political organizational point of view, I think, would have been to have the elections on ITT, not Maemo, and to allow 100% of the registered users to vote on representatives without taking any further action.

That would at any rate have avoided my comments about "Maemo is taking over," which was very upsetting because of the capitalization problem.

I think the maemo community council was a good idea, in theory. However, looking at the council page, it is what it says it is: the maemo (maemo.org) community council, ran through, and voted on by members of maemo.org. Which until recently did not include ITT. Although you could earn the required karma through ITT, which is about the only way to get voting privledges unless you are a developer.

I would point out that currently, there are still separate logins to talk and maemo.org. So although council members and others have claimed that a talk login will suffice for part of the voting requirements, the only sure way is to have a maemo.org login linked to a talk.maemo.org profile to earn the required karma.

I have suggested that this should be specifically addressed before the next election. I was told that my comments were off topic (arguably) or that I should direct my energies to helping with SSO (single sign on) which at the time was not even considering talk as a login to be included.

My thought being that until efforts are made to include the talk forum specifically, the council will continue to be the maemo.org community council, not the Maemo community council.

I definitely wish we'd had single sign on and a combined user base before the first election. However, I disagree that karma earning is limited mostly to Talk/iTT posts/thanks and application development. The karma page in the wiki lists a number of other options.

Following Texrat's trend of explaining real life experiences:

I'm the father of two little kids. They are lovely and they enjoy so much playing with each other and with their parents... except when they fight. And they fight quite regularly, actually.

The reasons for a fight can be many if you look at the surface: he is breaking the lego tower I just finished, he took my sword and ran away, he took and ate my piece of bread / no you gave it to me... and so on.

Actually the root reasons are basically two most of the times: they are hungry or they are tired or (worse) both.

The Maemo community is hungry of new hardware and fresh software. All you mention past times of community help and collaboration. Well, those were times when you all were busy with new stuff.

And a noticeable % of the most vocal guys of this community seem to be quite tired about certain things, and certain people. Because, let's not forget, all this "polarism" (as Texrat puts it) can be reduced to the discussions of a dozen of posters with hundreds/thousands of posts each.

The solution for hunger is coming and you don't need to blame yourselves since no Council or no Alternatives will change the dates.

The solution for tiredness however is all in the side of these bunch of veteran posters (and yes I take my piece of cake). Texrat put it well: give a rest to the Quick Reply button. Don't play ping pong, don't try to have the last word. You have exchanged already hundreds of posts between yourselves that are of little interest out of that elite of top posters.

If there is something you find hostile, upsetting, infuriating... the Maemo community probably doesn't need another Quick Reply about it from you right now. Give it a rest, move forward and make something more satisfying out of your time. If the next morning you still care about that post, have a look at it. Most probably someone else will have continued the thread and now the things will be settling.

And also very important: all these top posters have the best intentions with newcomers. However, the best favor someone can do to a newcomer is... provide her a good atmosphere to land and leave him time and space to have her own say. Chains of Quick Replies from the usual suspects arguing each other definitely don't help feeling anybody comfortable here.

And now about the couple of topics that seem to be more controversial: Council and ITt merge. It's also unsurprising that they create friction now in the early stages since they belong to something humans use to fight about: power and territory. Or better said: different opinions about power and territory.

About the Council, I personally think that most people is giving too much importance to it. I really wonder why. It seems almost a paradox that the ones less happy about the Council seem to be the ones "giving" more powers to it. However, most topics can be discussed, agreed, and executed without needing any Council at all. Just like before the Council existed.

It may also be that a % of blame Nokia became before is now redirected to them. But still I wonder what is it there to blame. What is the Council doing that is so upsetting? Actually... what is the Council TEAM doing?

It looks like there is a confusion between "the Council" (a team of elected members) and "Council members" (5 individuals that were active in the community and keep being active now). Question to yourself: has your opinion changed lately about Jaffa, GeneralAntilles, timsamoff, Kees or qole? Let me guess most answers from those top posters: no. The fact that these people are now council members have accentuated your previous opinion (good->better, bad->worse), but the existance of the Council itself is not the root of the (quite personal actually?) problems. Those problems, quite normal in any place where humans spend a lot of time together, actually originated in those times of happy community help and collaboration - but they were mostly covered because there was fresh food to fight hunger and plenty of multidirectional discussion to avoid tiredness among the usual suspects.

About the ITt merge, it's all about territory IMO. It's understandable that frictions appear and they usually get sorted out over time. What I don't understand is this feeling of "loosing power" with the merge. What is exactly the power that an ITt member could exercise before (under the highly appreciated and never contested benevolent dictator Reggie) and now (with the same Reggie for Talk + an alignement with the now community driven maemo-org, an alignement Reggie agrees with and helps consolidating)?

I would say that the average ITt contributor had the power to collaborate and argue against the powers that be. And now can do exactly the same, and even have an influence to the Council that will push some points of the agenda to Nokia in a way that no long hot ITt thread could do before. And Talk can still have long hot threads blaming Nokia and whoever you prefer.

All in all I think the whole problem is highly emotional and this is why my personal way to deal with it is to fight not you or you but hunger (in the little measure I can) and tiredness (posting less and thanking more what others say, specially those with good ideas and far from the top posts rankings).

I think that the root of the problem might be a perception that an hobbistic, grassroots place of discussion (and its light-hearted fellow inhabitants) has been absorbed into a marketing- and brand-oriented corporate site, which imposes loyalty to brand logo and colors, to proper capitalization of words, and to other trivial details which give people a disturbing feeling of external control.

I don't endorse this view and think that ITT before, and Talk now, are essentially the same thing from same people. But several posts seem to me to come from such a perception.

Good points!

- Maemo brand: I agree that grassroots contributors and actually most humans on Earth shouldn't care much about branding and even less about correctness on brands. And I'm saying this as one of the Nokia employees responsible of keeping the Maemo brand clean. So please, don't argue about this. It's true that Nokia is the "external controller" of the Maemo brand but Nokia didn't make the maemo.org logo, nor decided the maemo.org layout and is not enforcing everybody to use proper capitalization on day to day communications (if you come up with a banner for a conference that says "maemo" we will remind you that it is either "maemo.org" or "Maemo" depending on what you want to say, yes).

- About the Talk colors, hopefully the issue is settled now. Right, the process of the new colors was open and democratic, only happening in maemo.org and not directly in ITt. Still... how democratic were the previous designs made by Reggie? Which brings to the next point.

- Conspiracy? Many people in this loud segment of top posters seem not to believe that maemo.org has gone really off the control of Nokia. It has. If the Maemo community doesn't revamp this afternoon the whole contebnt of the website is because you don't feel the ned or you prefer to do other things. This will come clearer with the release of maemo.nokia.com and the Maemo 5 developer pages in Forum Nokia, but this is also tied to the Hunger problem (the release of those sites come together with the release of new software).

Yay, cookies before dinner ! It's just amazing how those threads explode.

The true value of the past few days, however, lay with this thread. While some of us might be off to run a few circles around the house now that they have their hunger satiated for a short while, let's not forget this thread. Texrat raised a very important point and had a response which should really be a model for ALL discussions here.

Thank you!

And to Quim... Some times a cigar is just a cigar.

The root cause might actually be the reason this thread was created in the first place.

I thought it had to do with the responses on this forum by someone who purports to represent this community. I don't usually respond that way, you don't respond that way, most other members don't respond that way...

How can we as a community communicate to all that most find particular behaviors inappropriate and that they are NOT representative of the spirit, intent, or style of our community.

BTW I agree, it has nothing to do with whatever council a community member belongs to. I also know I am guilty of inappropriate responses at times. What isn't very clear to some is, when is that line crossed?

Thank you Texrat for this thread. I believe it is worth pausing and asking ourselves how things are going and, if needed, what can be improved.

I would like to throw-in a couple of points.

- Definitely, I also think that the absence of major changes in hardware/software has left people wanting and provoked long and animated discussions often over trivial things

- Having a Council elected "democratically" creates the perception in some, whether council members or not, that the Council = government. Naturally, given the nature of a basically FOSS community like this, the presence of government authority warrants some reaction. Now, from what I understand, the Council does (should) not have any authority but only help organize work and "represent" the community in certain instances.

- I sometimes wonder if there could be a seasonal cycle in the outburst of violent discussion on the forum. I may be wrong, but I have the impression that last year around this time discussions heated up quite a bit. It looks as if there is a pattern similar to aggressive behavior by car drivers in spring...

I would like to make a couple of suggestions (they are a little provocative):

- To avoid perception of the Council equaling a government authority one could ask whether the democratic principle should be the only or the most appropriate way for the community to organize its work? is there a possibility of a less formal process in which contribution from community members (users and developers) is welcome and streamed into a workflow? Leadership in different areas of maemo related work (web site, software projects, forum, summit, bugs, etc.) would come up from the work done and the ability of members to related to the rest of the community (including the users that are not members).

- To reduce ego battles why not make the whole system anonymous? Nobody would have to defend his/her own position and authority in endless discussions.

- Abolish "Thanks". There is clearly some abuse going on and the thanks system, while well intended, inadvertently may stimulate some not so healthy contest.

- Abolish post count. As was mentioned in another thread, the post count gives the idea that the opinions of those with a higher number count more. The same goes for karma.

I know these suggestions could appear too extreme (although I am convinced that something along the line could help). I hope at least that giving some consideration to how the community works and is organized will make us a little more humble and more willing to help each other. It is useless and counterproductive to have groups and polarization in the community as this could lead to implosion before Nokia or another manufacturer brings a new device to the market.

Regards,
Antonio