The N900 is reaching out beyond the maemo.org developer community, attracting smartphone/mobile computer consumers with less technical skill and knowledge than those who historically have frequented maemo.org. I believe the N900 and the success of future maemo devices will change the user profile of maemo.org significantly.

To make the transition easier I'd like to suggest a user and developer sub forum to the current N900 forum. Here is why:

1. Let’s start out with a broader view: Yesterday Nokia held a capital markets day for the financial community. In short, it was not a success because the financial community didn’t believe Nokia will succeed with its smartphone & mobile computer strategy.

If you want the details here are a couple of quotes from the Financial Times:

“Shares in the world’s largest mobile phone maker fell 2.4 per cent to close at €8.70 after investors were disappointed by Nokia’s guidance for its handset business.”

“Enhancing the attractiveness of Nokia’s smartphones is essential if the company is to raise the profitability of its handset unit, because the sophisticated devices generate a higher margin than basic handsets.”

“The profitability of Nokia’s handset business has plunged this year, in part because of its struggle to produce user-friendly smartphones, and Mr Kallasvuo outlined efforts to remedy the situation.”

“Nokia also said it would release a sophisticated smartphone based on a Linux operating system called Maemo in the second half of next year. It will be a successor device to the N900.”

Some analysts even went as far as to say that a smartphone success has not been discounted into Nokia’s share price. This means that Nokia succeeding in this area is not expected by the financial community.

2. To succeed Nokia arguably needs to speed up development, and heed and listen very closely to both the developers and to the newbies and inexperienced users who do not speak the engineering or software development language.

The latter group is the mass of the market. I believe a lot of them will not post in the Sandbox, or in the bugs threads, because it requires procedural knowledge, and even a specific language to be understood in those parts of the forum.

3. Right now, about 50% of all Talk participants on-line are on the N900 device forum. This forum is as popular as all the other taken together. With more widespread N900 success, more users will gather on maemo.org. They are likely to start out in the N900 thread. The majority are likely to be user rather than developer focused participants.

4. The maemo.org introduction describes the Maemo Community as follows:

“The Maemo Community is an open source community developing software around the Maemo platform. The Maemo community has over 22.000 registered members that contribute to more than 900 community development projects in the Maemo Garage.”

I’m wondering whether this will be accurate in a few months time? In a year’s time? Again, with the success of the maemo5 based N900 (and hopefully an even greater success with its maemo6 successor) I believe the forum will be flooded with new consumers who to a large extent may be unfamiliar with “open source” and “developing software.” They are just after the “community” aspect and some assistance to understand the device they have bought.

As a current member of maemo.org you may like or dislike this development. However, it is still likely to take place.

Take a look at what happened to XDA-developers. For those of you unfamiliar with that community, it started out as an HTC/Windows Mobile developer driven community.

To quote XDA “we realised that lots of ordinary users were also suffering from a lack of support. They started using the xda-developers forum to communicate and before long the forum was as much a user forum as it was a developer forum.”

Today the XDA-developers forum has close to 2 million members, over 255.000 active members, and somewhere around 5.000 on line at any given time. The overwhelming majority are not developers.

5. Right now on the N900 forum there are a lot of threads describing user experience. Some of these threads contain animosity, name calling such as “fan boy”, “troll”, flaming etc. I believe the maemo community is suffering culture clash at the moment. There are gems of relevant information in those threads, but I find there’s a lot of clutter to wade through as well.

Although there are a lot of neutral participants, there are some indications that there are “camps” forming, for example those who critique the N900 in various ways, and those that defend it. Another angle is that there’s a split between those who to some extent would like this forum to stay a forum of developers rather than to see it develop into a user community. My personal belief is it will be very hard to keep this a developer community.

So for the above reasons I would like to see a new sub-forum to the N900 forum. Or possibly a split into “N900 for developers” and “N900 for users.” In the user part all the ignorant newcomers, such as myself, can vent their seemingly stupid questions, and experienced maemo.org members so inclined can lend a hand, whether they are developers or just super-users.

Those of a more pure developer focus, who would rather not be irritated by newcomers who have no clue about terminal/command line etc can stay away from that forum.

Hence there will be less animosity both ways. Good for maemo.org, good for developers and good for new users.

Most of all, it will make it easier for those professionals at Nokia who want to follow the user experience, without having to read through useless and frequent "ego and flame wars," on the forum, and without having to retort to relying exclusively on customer focus groups.

So, ultimately it will be good for the N900, for ALL its stake-holders and hence for Nokia.

PS. Yes I know this should probably go under "Community." However it'll reach more members in the N900 thread. RevdKathy already tried in the Community and attracted little attention. My apologies to you for not following your thread. DS

I think a dedicated N900 forum outside of the restrictions placed on maemo.org

Is essential to the N900's future.

So I'll sign up and I know at least 10 others from this forum that are desperately seeking another forum to bounce ideas around

Gadgety, there is a Development forum: http://talk.maemo.org/forumdisplay.php?f=13

Also a thread about Nokia Capital Markets: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=35637

GwizG, which restrictions are you suffering here?

qgil, thanks for the reply:

Nevertheless, whatever you call the sub forums, I find there is still a need in the N900 forum to divide things up. They could be called whatever: N900 for terminal/command liners and N900 for consumers. I believe you are at Nokia. What is your understanding of what's going on in this forum at the moment? Do you see any culture clash here? Does it matter? Can we learn anything from XDA-developers? etc.

PS. I already participated in the capital market thread. My mention of financial community here is just to frame my suggestion. It would be wrong to post this in that thread. Thank you anyway. DS

PPS. Do you never sleep? DDS.

The funny part though, is that talk.maemo.org, previously InternetTabletTalk.com, has historically been mostly a user site. Developers--with noteable exceptions, of course--have largely stayed away, communicating via the mailing list and hanging out on IRC. Developers, after all, ofter prefer to be coding, not yakking about trivialities in long, winding threads. Sure, they may drop in to announce a new version of something or help a user who has hit a bug, but they haven't been the ones running up their post counts day in and day out.

Having the site go so quickly from being ribbed by the developers to being seen as "developer focused" leaves me chuckling.

A very interesting post.
Im a noob, and Im not a developer, and Im interested to know how you would like to divide things up for the better.
There is and will be alot of noise, but dividing things up will not stop that happening. The n900 forum will take a on a life of its own whatever happens.
I am aware of the developers forum, have even posted in it once or twice, but tend to stay away from that side of things as it isn't where my main focus is right now. If I start to code, then I will be more active there, but for now the n900 forum is the place for me, for questions, advice and general shared community feel - check the MPD thread

I think that my experience will be a typical one, and I feel happy to start any thread about the n900 that I want, the forum will police its self with the help of the mods if needed. I think that maybe after the xmas holidays it might be time to step back and take a look, but for now, lets wait until more people have the device and see how the forums are being used before making any changes???

The XDA forums are a good example to use, but I think that if there is any learning to be done, then maybe that would be for Nokia, but the situation here is different.
XDA has a huge following for supplying cooked ROM's for phones, filling a gap that the manufacturers have so far refused to do anything about. I'm running WM6.5.3 on my i780, Samsung won't provide software updates to do this, so I went to XDA to get it. The n900 is far more open, so the prime driver for these forums is going to be different, and I think we will see this over time.

Just to let everyone know I'm in the process of setting up an N900 forum.

Help is required so people interested in helping & modding please pm me asap.

I think our s/n ratio would benefit from a little more heavy-handed moderation.

In the meantime, does vBulletin support killfiles?

There doesn't seem to be much concern on the part of those who could do something about it, so although there have been many similar suggestions, not a lot appears to be getting anywhere.

Anyway, in my opinion that little sidebar labeled "Active Topics" is the number one problem with Talk. What i mean is that the lack of filtering for that means that you have random newbies dropping into otherwise technical discussions to make points either irrelevant or pointless or downright wrong. How do they get there? My bet is they clicked one of the topics that was active.

By adding some filtering and granularity to the forum, a lot could be improved. Imagine if newly subscribed people didn't see any topics outside of "general", say, in "Active Topics" unless they went into their user settings and deliberately changed the subfora that they are subscribed to.

I'd personally like to be able to unsubscribe from the general, sales and N900 fora because other people's opinion of the N900 or lack of comprehension of "comprehensive" isn't really something i want to waste my time on.

I realize many developers don't actually hang out here, but i think it serves a valuable role as an interface between users and developers--if only the noise could be turned down so that developers are willing to show up.

Separate forums are good but I also agree a little moderation would do wonders here. This place has been unbearable for last two months with every thread devolving into an off topic *****-fest or personal idealogical argument. Censorship sucks but communicating effectively is also important here. A reply rating system that hides but does not delete the crap would be great.