Now that I'm trying to turn off my brain for the night, I can't help but feel that my bridge analogy would have worked much better had it not been for the fact that every bridge is supposed to have a gap, and every engineer would know that and think me a ***** for rubbing his face in it.

I'm such a noob, what happened to the 'thanks' link?

Sometimes you have to refresh the page.

Reggie is the administrator of talk.maemo.org in the very same way he was the administrator of ITT. afaik the council has never attempted to appoint an administrator, and if you look at the Moderators thread you will find some council members asking for permissions just like anybody else.

What Reggie and Nokia have negotiated is that Nokia assumes the hosting costs (no ads in talk.maemo.org) and funds a certain amount of hours from Reggie, that he invests in administrative tasks, or whatever he feels like doing. We haven't ever discussed about content or moderation rules dictated by Nokia and that would have been a horrible idea. Remember that ITT merged with maemo.org at the same time that maemo.org was handled to the community, and actually that merge was an important part of the equation to have a community driven maemo.org.

Yes, you did. And I thank you for your valiant efforts.

What was your better idea by the time a solution had to be implemented? Or what is your better idea today?

The situation in real terms is: a forum existed with plenty of posts and users, and a bugzilla existed also with plenty of reorts and users. Your options are:

- Put the tools under the same roof first and leave the complex user integration for later (the option chosen).

- Keep the forum and start blank with a new integrated bugzilla (you duplicate bugzillas).

- Keep the bugzilla and start blank with a new integrated forum (you duplicate forums).

- Don't merge anything until the SSO has been sorted out (so far there have been other priorities like speeding up servers, and SSO in maemo.org is a tough one. Anybody can join the maemo.org development sprints and lobby for their preferred features)


If someone at talk.maemo.org wants to be involved, the barrier is registering to maemo.org and adding your Talk profile URL to your maemo.org URL. It takes 2 mins = small barrier. If someone doesn't want to invest that time fine, but then the motivations are closer to not willing to be involved in the whole maemo.org the council represents. And that is fine too. You can be a great Maemo contributor without ever leave talk.maemo.org (and you volt are a good proof).

Another way to look at this is: if ITT would have stayed apart as a forum then you wouldn't have been involved in any maemo.org council election either.

fwiw I think Wikipedia still requires separate registration for each language and service, even if all of them are based on the same MediaWiki tool. And look how big that community has grown without making a big fuzz of this small barrier.

Call me a heretic, but in an odd sort of way, I can see value to not having SSO. I'm a forum freak. At any given time I'm actively participating in three different forums on completely different topics. I've run my own on occasions, and stood as mod (and intermittently admin) at one place for 8 years. So registering for a forum was the most natural thing in the world for me.

Then, as I deepened in interest, I was presented with a reality check: wiki-editing/voting etc.. do you really want to go that far? Bug-filing... do you really want to be that involved? (NO!!! Bugzilla terrifies me!) and most recently "Are you willing not only to cherry pick what interests you on the forum but to have Maemo stuff up your maibox too?"

At each point, I was offered a choice of "No, this is involved enough for me".

SSO may be a Holy Grail, but we'd lose as well as gain in finding it.

As for 'where conversation happens' as a rabid forum freak with a deep, viscal loathing for mailing lists, you might expect me to feel strongly that all debate should happen here. But you know what? I hate certain types of music, too, but wouldn't close the radio stations. I loathe football (soccer) and believe only cricket or rugby (Union) are worthy of watching, but I wouldn't cancel Match of the Day. My preference is for worship involving lots of rousing hymn singing... but I can enjoy a silent retreat or a waft of incense now and again! There are people who feel as strongly as I do about fourms that mailing lists are the Only True Way to communicate. If I want to be in connexion with them (Methodist spelling - not a typo!) then I have to allow for and live with the diversity involved.

What I'm looking for in a council is people willing to live with the lumpy bits of our community and try to work with the amazing diversity we have here, not take sides or worse, try to 'cancel' the communication they dislike.

Not really: qwerty12 & fms don't even have a blog, mikkov & yerga have very little blog karma and sjgadsby's is just a vehicle for publishing the bugjars. The remaining 5 are qgil and 4 current/former council members, ie people whose blog content would be highly relevant because of their positions so it's hardly surprising they'd be high on the list.

I never thought they were until very recently.

When I first declared my understanding was that the primary function, in fact just about the only function identified on the Community Council WiKi page was:

After answering Jaffa's original questions my position was simply:

If elected I will push for a strong, more focused community voice from within the forums.

In my research and preparation for actually realizing this goal if elected, I focused on why the forums were not already a strong community voice. Why haven't the forums evolved naturally to the point where anyone; prospective new community member and Nokia executive alike could spend a short time perusing these forums and walk away with an accurate "reading" of what this community is all about?

If this was the television show or the perks received for winning a seat on the council were on par with those received by a US Congressman, I would simply walk into the next room and call out for the most recent polling data.

Since this is not TV I have to rely on what material is available to me on the WiKi, anecdotal information given to me by current and prospective community members, and my own observations.

On the WiKi it states that:

Also on the WiKi it states:

Not having been a member of council I am not privy to who this staff is and they are not identified on the WiKi.

If this staff is related to the administration or day to day operation of the forum, my position is that the council should have nothing to do with "oversight" with respect to this and that forum administration should be autonomous and separate and apart from council influence. I further go on to state that the administrator should have control over who he/she chooses to moderate a forum.

I also realize that the use of the word "staff" could be singular and that this refers to the "distmaster" that qole mentioned earlier.

I will continue to refine my position as more information becomes available to me.

I have more to say on this subject and planned to work from home this morning. However, I just received a call requesting my presence at a remote site.

Please excuse me from this discussion at this time.








One of the reasons reported to me by other forum members was

This is a bigger problem than Maemo.org's implementation of Bugzilla, it's the general idea for all that is bug reporting. Maemo had to implement one solution and I bet it was done after a fair evaluation of the alternatives. So this thing is not something I put on the current or any previous Maemo counsil or individuals...

But:

A better implementation would have been:
1) SSO. As smarter people than me are working for already.
- GUI: Bugzilla would only ask your password if you're not logged in at either branch of Maemo.org. Make a login component, possibly ajax, that fits into all the login locations, if necessarily. What are we talking about here, 6-8 different login boxes? Cake.

- DB: make a unified user database for these branches at a server that Maemo internally can agree upon. A user database only needs so many data fields and they should be all compatible despite slight variations. Half a day design job.

- Code: Rip out all code for login handling to session variables, this should be fairly concentrated in a few places. Rip out all code for user validation on every page that should be a code segment on top of each page or an included function on every page. Replace these with a single login object that is made to work with the former two aspects: the new DB and the GUI. I am thinking a forum like this has very little code that isn't already in a template or something, maybe just a few lines of code after all. Still, probably a bigger time thief than the other two subtasks.

Plus 2) Empower googlers to directly report in Bugzilla. If they have no account, by all means, allow them to sign up from Bugzilla (to all of maemo/meego) but also give them the other, rather common technique, where they can write in a simple Captcha, plus an email addy to receive feedback. Send them a verification link. Code like this already exists somewhere in the Maemo system, I'm pretty sure.

*cough*

So you did good. I think the move was smart for the platform. I do believe many smart moves are being made, especially when community members (unlike me) have been a part of the everchanging biosystem for a while and knows what works and what doesn't.

True, but on the other hand I believe quite few people work on several languages at the same time, compared to only their first language. A SSO for Maemo and Android forums would not make sense for me, but when these are different pages in the same top menu here at *.maemo.org, it makes sense. It would be the same users and you want to make them feel like a part of a tightly knitted together community, not like forum users and bugzilla users.