Hi, I had asked already about the Maemo community vs languages, and now I'm asking about the Maemo community vs places. It might be that this topic has been discussed before, but if so it would be good to reach a practical conclusion this time.

There are thousands of users registered at maemo.org and there is a field for "Country" in your maemo.org profile. And that's it.

Now, we are getting an increasing need to meet people in concrete places. Just in recent weeks we have got Maemo developer events in several cities, we are discussing about the possibility to have an Italian Long Weekend, Nokia France just opened http://www.maemo-nokia.fr/ and wants to invite Maemo contributors to events, Nokia Russia or Middle East are also interested in events involving Maemo contributors...

On the community side there are also more and more ideas to meet somewhere and do something, or simply communicate more often.

maemo.org has actually a CRM in place, somewhere in its backstage. We used it for the first time in the N810 device program and it's powering the registrations of our events.

So I wonder how could we use maemo.org more and better in order to bring this online community to the physical space as well?

And a practical example: Nokia France is really looking for Maemo community stars and developers. What should we do?

That should be easy, there's not many of us :-)

Benoît was on TV recently for the 5th anniversary of Firefox ans spoke of Maemo. Dunno if Nokia France was involved though :-)

http://intellintv.blip.tv/file/2893208/

We could do this quite easily by enabling "opt in" usage of Midgard's user location features that already exist but are not used on maemo.org

This would enable positioning users based on multiple sources:

• Browser geolocation (where supported, for example Fennec)
• IP location
• Manually entered and geocoded location (or picked from a map)
• Location imported from external location sharing services like Qaiku, Twitter, Plazes, Fireeagle (and in future, Google Latitude)
• We could even have a Jabber bot that follows user's location sharing from N900 instant messaging features

How to use location once we have it, then?

Some ideas:

• Show Maemo users on map (top karma, "nearby" etc)
• Location-based user searches
• Exposing users via the Open Colloboration Services (that are already used for Maemo Downloads API)
• Showing location in the user avatar widget in forums, brainstorms and Planet

I doubt there is time to do this still this year, but enabling these things in the maemo.org styles could easily be done in early January.

It could be possible to add a sort by country in http://maemo.org/profile/list/ ...

Something that should be simple to do is to find an easy (or documented) way for the Council to send emails to maemo.org users based on their country or location.

If we have a CRM it should be easy to decide to e.g. send an email to all users based in Spain with karma +25.

Peer to peer communications should be possible as well e.g. find other contributors in your city and send them a private message.

Let's see if something in this direction gets in the maemo.org backlog/sprints.

In the meantime we will keep improvising to find Spanish and French developers...

It's surprising how many Canadians there are here in talk.maemo.org, considering that we don't have a big population, we're fairly backward with 3G implementation, there doesn't seem to be any physical place to buy a Maemo device most of the time, and we don't even have a Nokia store at the moment.

This would sure help in my community outreach efforts...

Hum ... fpp just point me to this thread ... be carefull that some people didn't read so much t.m.o