I have to agree with lemmy. I think silent = "complacent/content/apathetic" majority works...

Has anyone asked Reggie if he'd want to sell/give/transfer/whatever the internettanblettalk.com domain to them?

~ and/or ~

Does this forum need an "Internet Tablet Talk" subforum?

Tim

Yes, but a) the elections are still a long way away, b) I just came up with one potential problem in the way of it, c) account merging/SSO faces many similar issues. So, input welcome.

Thanks :-) Glad we can narrow it down to a communication issue. Now, to allay your fears, I'm not aware of much of any discussion on the ITT->tmo move on the mailing lists. Pointers to threads I missed would be greatly appreciated (I guess the maemo-community archives would be best).

Sorry, I'm confused again. Is the issue communicating the election or communicating the tmo change? I think the strategies on communicating both are/should have been different:

• Election: everyone who was eligible to vote was emailed directly a number of times. There were threads here. Perhaps more use of direct tools like email everyone at ITT should have been used, but getting input from people before the election is run is a nightmare. No-one cares about process until it's too late; and last time we wanted to change the rules to be more inclusive by running some referenda.
• tmo change: since this has caused so much animosity and acrimony, in retrospect I wish we'd had the foresight to consider sending an email to the thousands of ITT account holders explaining the transition and what this would mean. However, no-one who commented on Reggie's announcement suggested that; and there wasn't really much reason to consider the change would be so... difficult.

Definitely something we should do for the next election. Not something I'm sure about for a sub-forum re-org. See, it's all about choosing the right tool for the job (previous job: communications editor - not every announcement gets spammed to the 3,000 people on site ;-))

You've got a point. I hope you'll admit that it's more likely that people will write something to complain than write something to laud a change.

Andrew-

I definitely agree that the people who are upset are the most likely to complain. Something that I take into account when reading product reviews.

I think it's just a communication issue in general whether it be the election, the forum reorg, or the redesign. I agree different communication types for different issues.

In the case of the forum redesign some of the comments *seemed* to me to indicate that some significant discussion took place other than in the forums (perhaps included in the redesign of maemo.org, then a semi-final product was introduced to the forum for testing/comment. Perhaps I am wrong on that point, but that's what it seems like happened to me. If I mis-understood some of the comments, I apologize. Just giving my impression of what happened.

In the case of the election, I wasn't around for the first one. The second one however: I am sure all eligible voters registered at maemo.org were notified appropriately. But...

There are a lot of users that participate in the forums who would have had enough karma and are most definitely part of the maemo community that the council represents who didn't get a chance to vote because they weren't aware of the requirements to become eligible (ie a maemo.org account).

The unfortunate perception then becomes: the recent changes to the forums (a larger user base) are being facilitated by / guided by / helped by the council who was elected by maemo.org (smaller user base). Particularly when these changes are then defended vigorously by the council (not that you are wrong to defend them).

In my opinion, IF there had been a better effort to educate the forum membership on the voting requirements, quite possibly there would have been many more people voting. I think this would have lessened the us vs. them we have seen/are seeing.

For instance the following 2 quotes each started a thread relating to the most recent election. Neither mention maemo.org membership is/was required, so my assumption reading these is that I was not eligible to vote, as I hadn't received any email. I also don't realize that I need a maemo.org login to be eligible in the future.

If the Maemo community wants, of course!

If the Maemo community doesn't want, of course not!

As a community member I would like to see more devices with Maemo inside, bringing more users interested in the applications sitting on top of the Maemo API and the internals of the Maemo operating system. With all its flavours, sure.

All those users would have more things to share than to diverge with the users of the "vanilla" Maemo. And I'm sure they will have different opinions about the D-Pad too.

Thanks for this - it's been the most helpful to me post on the topic.

I don't want to get into specific "nit-picking" over what happened where, just to identify the types of issues that have arisen and how they can be addressed.

On the one, thing, though:

Hmm. You're half right: the redesign of maemo.org - as a whole - happened mainly through maemo-community, the wiki and IRC meetings. However, there was no discussion in those environments as to how talk would look (although there were discussions about particular elements which may have been used on talk - like a user header for download comments which had a requirement of being able to be reused elsewhere).

The redesign of the talk theme was entirely in Reggie's hands (within the overall look & feel) - just as all the other themes (which over the past 4 years have always been met by constructive criticism) have been.

Perhaps the council should have worked on pushing Reggie to deliver prototypes, mockups and plans - but that seems unfair to him when he a) always delivers; b) has the best interests of the community at heart; c) is doing this in his spare time and d) isn't employed by the community (as represented by the council).


Thanks - it's useful. No need to apologise for stating your understanding/impression; it's when people start stating such things as facts that I get frustrated.

At that point, though, nothing you could have done would have made you eligible - as there's an account age limit to prevent ballot stuffing. And, as I said, trying to mobilise people about process before an election/referendum has proved to be impossible (see, for example, the threads on counting methods).

Now, we've already decided that "talk.maemo.org account" falls under the definition of "maemo.org account" as stated in the election process; so this shouldn't be an issue next time.

And that is a big problem. For which I can only apologise. I can promise that, as a council, we will take more care in our "official" communications for big, important, things like this in future.

1. He asked.
2. I genuinely believe it is possible that he (or anyone in general) might miss info that is added in an edit to a post that was made previously, and figured he might be interested in reading the expanded post if that was the case.
3. END

Andrew (and the rest of the council, etc):

I think in reality all that most of us are asking for is better communication of issues. I think that would go a long way to pacifying a lot of the folks here in the forums. I understand that it may take a lot of extra effort to keep everyone in all the multiple communication venues in the maemo community, but I think it would be worth it in the long run. I know there have been several threads on communication, with some good ideas, so I think that at least we are moving forward towards better communication.

Actually, I don't think I would have been eligible to vote (maybe if I had signed up on maemo.org immediately after joining ITT, I would have made it). I just wanted to point out that there may have been some people who could have joined in time and didn't realize it. It was fairly complicated process to get everything setup.

lemmy, are you blue in the face yet?

Thank you Jaffa and dneary for your participation in this thread. I got pulled away for a work related issue and could not respond until now.

The reason for my original post was to respond to the numbers that were used to justify the logic of recent actions.

I was also trying to say that Maemo Council, the administration of this forum, Council elections, and maemo.org are all different things and this would be in agreement with you, I believe.

(In the spirit of the topic of this thread I want to add how difficult it was to compose that last sentence... I still fear that someone will jump in at anytime to correct my capitalization, punctuation, or some other trivial thing in the name of meamo.org and that this correction will bring the thread to a screeching halt. Any point that was being made, idea proposed, or direction that the threaded conversation was taking would then be lost. )

I also agree that no malice aforethought or gaming took place by any of the participants and I wish to re-emphasize that as strongly as possible.

Now on to my threaded response:

Actually I was trying to point out the involvement of Nokia and the motivation for many of the changes in this forum as well as the unintended consequences.

Me? With regard to the forum why are you asking? IMHO and as I have posted before, forums seem to work best when there is a benevolent dictator directing and administrating changes. Moderation is limited and almost anonymous. Forums that try to engage members in some sort of democratic process of administration quickly loose focus on their intended subject and become forums about forums.

In this case the selection of moderators was public and the criteria tied to karma. And again, those forum members who had not registered with maemo.org may have felt they were SOL.

If mods were selected by a benevolent dictator for their commitment to the smooth operation of the forum, and they were notified via private message, we would have seen less tumult.




With regard to maemo.org I would have looked first at why there was not more forum member involvement. At the very least I might have acknowledged the differences in forum, mailing list, and IRC cultures and familiarized myself with the individual etiquettes of each mode of communication before jumping in and making changes.

Imagine if a gang of primarily forum members logged on to a scheduled maemo.org event on an IRC channel with a big “Howdy” to everyone and immediately asked “Where do I get some cool downloads?” with out regard to the topic at hand?

Well the same could be said about people who “troll” to “thread crap” a forum or attempt to hijack a forum threads topic and redirect it when they don't particularly like the way things are going... Turning a topic back on a respondent could also be considered a thread hi-jack, but it's done by proxy. The results are the same as the conversation gets redirected to something not related to the point being made or the question that was raised.

A lot of that^ started happening here all of a sudden.

...Until changes are made.

***

BTW, my heckles (I know what you meant, Dave ) have never been raised by the direction or intent of this community. The community has provided for me very well over the years. I try to pay it back by sharing what I have learned through posts and threads on this forum. A forum IMHO, has been the best form of community communication since Caesar was a plebe.

The last recreational mailing list I belonged to was in the early ‘90’s and its credo was “Live to Flame and Flame to Live” (DoD #76 ). Relay chats seem to me to loose effectiveness the larger a group becomes. Some eventually turn into what could be best described as cocktail parties where side conversations about obscure sci-fi novels determine who is heard instead of relevance to the topic at hand...

However, a mailing list is the best way I know to communicate the status of a group project and relay chats, provided they have specific agendas are a very good way for smaller sub-groups to manage assigned tasks.

The problem is/was to most forum members they didn't think this forum was a “project” and the first time they even heard of a sub-group or committee was the Community Council. To me there is no wonder why some are confused.

Perhaps now that the changes are made we should all wait for the dust to settle and I think that was one of the purposes of this thread.

Now that leads us to my motivation...
None of the changes in particular bothered me. I rather liked the new lay-out and colors. I load up the new posts page when I visit so sub-forums and where a post is placed is of little importance to me. The problem I had when a thread of mine was moved was that it was done within minutes of my posting it and in doing so it was taken out of the new posts queue so that even I couldn't find the dang thing again.

When I inquired about new thread posting criteria in an active thread about forum changes, I was directed to an instruction sticky that had been substantially changed since I had posted the day before. Moving threads without giving the author a reason and making rule changes without showing an edit are not what most forums do. A simple Mod edit: (Mod edits are usually small instructional posts made by a moderator within a member’s post.) in both cases would have sufficed.

The reason I speak up on other issues may have something to do with how I was brought up... I come from a large family where I was the child born right smack in the middle of all the others. I had an equal number of older siblings as younger ones. When we walked in a group, the older ones longer strides put them ahead of the younger ones, yet the younger ones worked harder and faster just to catch-up... I was always taught to stick-up for the little guys.

Also: I don't usually get "hot under the collar".
However I do tend to talk louder when a point I’m trying to make is being ignored.