Seems that nobody cares about that, at least I tried

Wow.

I was thinking that I'd make sure no vote of mine would go to someone not pro single-sign-on, but I just realized that I do not even have a vote.

And never will. Blaming the negative sides of a structural fragmentation on the users? That's really humble. You can all have your karma all to yourself. Looks like mine will never start counting.

How many times do you expect users care to sign up, how many hoops before they lose faith in an organization?

Finally, I found something worth my 500th post.

On one hand I understand where that sentiment comes from. Heck, I hate having multiple logins across the internet, much less a "single" site.

On the other hand, I expect people interested in solutions to jump through whatever hurdles there are in order to get people in place who believe as they do and will act in their interest.

Democracy is messy. The easiest governance is the most controlling.

Who's not pro-SSO?

You'd be eligible if you registered; just as I have to do if I want to vote in the forthcoming UK general election. You should've received instructions before the last election giving you exact steps, and you could do it now - and vote in this election - in 8 steps:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Link_talk.maem...mo.org_profile

I'm not blaming the negative sides of the fragmentation on the users! I'm blaming that on organic growth and a lack of movement on the SSO developments. I'd even be worried that with the focus on MeeGo now, the SSO ball might get dropped.

However, it's not just an SSO problem - that's tricky enough with systems with shared sign-on (Midgard, Mediawiki, Garage); however there are thousands of accounts in garage.maemo.org and thousands of active accounts on talk.maemo.org. Some have the same usernames, but are owned by different users; some have different usernames but are the same user; there are multiple accounts; and missing contact details. It's a big, and non-trivial, problem to try and solve.

The process is sub-optimal; however I said two things I think you missed: "if the council really were making far reaching decisions" (I think there've been two in its history: the debmaster and the distmaster) and "a 'forum-only' member has no excuse for not being aware or involved". 'Awareness' is the effort people have gone to to ensure that people who could be realistically identified as having a tmo account which was eligible to vote (and hadn't already got a garage account) being emailed explicit instructions on how to register and the numerous blog posts and stickies about the elections.

FWIW, I think we have three account systems currently:

1. Garage: used by garage.maemo.org, maemo.org/downloads/, wiki.maemo.org, maemo.org/packages/ and everything Midgard based.
2. Talk: used by talk.maemo.org
3. Bugzilla: used by bugs.maemo.org

While I'd expect that every council member will push for a SSO, my vote will get the one who pushes for canceling the duplicity of a mailing list / forum system. My opinion on that one can be read HERE.

Having some talks on mailing lists, and others on forums, effectively forces users to use both to stay involved and/or informed, and further contributes to the community fragmentation.

That's a mechanism for communication, so did you believe the right things were communicated, just not in the most visible way? (I don't remember Reggie replying whether or not it was doable; however, if it is, it's a mechanism which I hope would be used carefully and with consideration in future. But we should be careful of its overuse.)

For example, in the circumstance we're discussing, Reggie himself announced it on the frontpage of internettablettalk.com, which resulted in a thread in the forums (the exact sections of which I'm not sure of, since it pre-dates the great reshuffle).

OK, so it wasn't prominently showed on people's next visit, but it was hardly hidden in the basement behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard".

As you'll have seen, this has now taken effect, with all decisions being primarily discussed in talk. Of course, now it makes them easy to get lost in the noise, but the diligent set of moderators try to sticky those which are though to be important. And other efforts, like my own Maemo Weekly News, try to distill the news. But slamming up an interstitial for everything "that can affect the community" wouldn't work - it'd become too frequent. So even with that tool at our disposal in future, it'd require someone to evaluate everything and then decide if it was appropriate. That's a lot of points for people missing things and still you'd end up with some people thinking the tool was being overused, and others thinking it was underused.

Out of the 11 people who have been on the council, 9 either started in the forums or have been very active here over the entire course of their involvement. The implication that the "community members who were primarily involved in the forum" were somehow ignored, forgotten about or purposely sidelined is particularly grating. Some of us have gone to great lengths, and great effort, to ensure that - in the last election in particular - everyone on the forum who was eligible to vote on their forum activity alone received explicit instructions on how to ensure they were eligible to vote, and why it was important.

303 people voted in the last election. The theory that there is a vast pool of enfranchised people on the fora, waiting for the opportunity to make their voice heard doesn't seem to be reality. Getting involvement or traction on any particular topic proves difficult, whether it's bug days; testing marathons; community outreach or input on what colour to paint the bikeshed - and this isn't just on talk.maemo.org.

I argue that real end-users don't regularly (or, in the vast majority of cases, ever) post to Internet forums. What we have here, and elsewhere on maemo.org, are enthusiasts and power-users.

I don't disagree!

<sigh />

I said trying to count the exact number of people in the Maemo community was somewhat wasted effort. You can get some headline numbers, but even if you ignore the talk.maemo.org accounts which have been disabled (i.e. because they're spammers) - which is about half - you still have long dormant accounts. But what do some big numbers tell you? Is Mike Cane still a part of the Maemo community, for example (his talk account is active and he's eligible to vote in the election if he wanted to)?

What about bloggers? What about people who post at Forum Nokia; or other forums? What about someone who develops software for internal use at their company, and never uploads it to Extras? Hell, before we had the push on third party repositories, you couldn't even really tell how many people were pushing out packages for Maemo!

Let's do a thought experiment. We have a consumer, Bob, who's just bought an N900 after some pretty adverts he saw all over the printed media in London. At what point does he become "part" of the Maemo community:

1. He reads the manual.
2. He tweets that it's really cool, and reads some tweets from others about them.
3. He googles "N900" and reads a blog or two about what other people are doing with it.
4. He goes to Ovi Store and downloads Angry Birds.
5. He goes to Maemo Select and downloads ATI85.
6. He goes to maemo.org/downloads/ and installs OMWeather.
7. He goes back to maemo.org/downloads/ and installs a few other things.
8. He wonders where portrait mode/voice-navigation/MMS is, and finds talk.maemo.org. He signs up for an account and posts a message asking how to turn it on.
9. After getting his answer, he wanders off for a while whilst still using his N900 every day.
10. He installs some more software from maemo.org/downloads/ and decides to rate it, so signs up for a maemo.org account to leave a comment for the developer.
11. He starts rating more software as he uses it.
12. He occasionally looks at talk.maemo.org's front page to see if there are any interesting "Active Topics"
13. He sees a topic which is asking a question to which he knows the answer and posts a reply.
14. ...

I'm bored now - but I hope you see my point: there are a lot of stages between "getting account", "creating first thread", "rating first download", "creating second thread", "posting first reply" in which someone could become engaged and part of the community. Until Bob's tenth post and until he's checking talk.maemo.org at least once a week, I'd say Bob wouldn't consider himself "part of the community" and that's what the definition of the community really is: if you think you're part of it, you are. And that's why it's difficult to count.

What you fail to realize, is that any web site on the internet, needs to deserve being signed on to. The fact that you need to create a new account to report a bug into bugzilla, is ridiculous. Someone should be fined for the idea.

talk.maemo.org, or dare I say ITT, deserves mine and many other people's sign up. But if I come up with possibly good, productable improvement suggestions, the brainstorming division should come chasing me and not with account forms or other hoops, I might add.

And if someone wants to be involved, like we've seen here, it should really be on their premises and not force them into some other technology than the one they have chosen. Email lists are fine if you like it, as is usenet and IRC, but if someone hate these forms of communication and already is part of this community through this form of communication, they're not good enough? That would be eliteism. Stuffing people into a technical solution to run when it's really the brain of that person that is interesting, is really bad prioritizing. Shape the communication around the person, not the person around the communication form.

Nothing here is about adapting to the user. When it is infact, not Nokia, not the developers, not the community counsil, not even the community, that Maemo is all about.

Maemo is all about the end user. The 14-post not-yet-happy person that there exist 1000 of for every orangebox or volt, and a million of for every Texrat.

Unfortunately, this organization hates that person and does everything it can to filter it out.

At least, that is how it looks to me, and I already know better.

Just for the record, I have found myself writing both product improvement suggestions, bug notices and clicked vote a dozen times before I realized I had to create a new account for it to count. I will not create a new account for it. This is a principle. I decide when or what to sign up for on the internet. I seriously believe that most of you share the exact same principle.

bugtrackers worldwide require identifiers.
it is just common sense - the world over and whichever form they are:
issue tracking is an involved time consuming process and could be the only formal point of contact with the specific developer or team involved in the application you have a problem with.

if you cannot signup and make yourself accountable and be involved in the process, then i am sorry - your rant will likely go unheard.

It would be helpful if you indicated who the "you" is.

If you're responding to my point about disliking multiple logins across the internet, kindly note I'm not opposed to the basic need for a login at all. So, no, I don't "fail to realize" anything in that regard. In fact I'm very encouraged by the recent growth in adoption of OpenID and reciprocal logins. That's probably as close to SSO as the internet can get without totalitarianism.

I do, as I've said, agree with the complaints about lack of SSO here.

If you weren't responding to my post, then just ignore this.