In hindsight the easiest filter would have been a Phone specific sub-forum. Also in keeping with your theme on using the "Community" forum as a place where new forum members would be funneled: This would be the place to sticky a "New Members Please Read" thread.

I know we don't apparently like the word "Rules" around here but most every other forum has them and the first one is usually "All new members are expected to read the dang things"

We can call them posting guidelines or whatever, but something should be there because that is what most new members will look for. Most new forum members are new to this forum, not new to forums in general. Perhaps we shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel here but use whatever momentum a new member brings with him/her to an advantage.

As I recall back in the days of the first council's (pre forum) someone wrote a very good intro on the opening page of the maemo.org site that explained the levels of community involvement that were available to new members. Perhaps something along these lines should also be included to explain the whole community. I know the current intro makes no mention of talk.maemo.org but does link to maemo.nokia.com

And finally perhaps the definitions of Maemo "community" and "developer" need to be expanded to better distinguish these terms from the more traditional, Forum Nokia like definitions...

When maemo.org first acquired itT I saw it as an expansion of the community to include "engaged users" and other evangalista's. I also saw it as reaching out to those users with the message that you too are a developer if you take the OS that was presented to you, and make it work for you, in your world. I saw the forums as a place for these users to share these personal development experiences and perhaps even come to the same conclusion; that using Maemo made them a developer... and it was easy!

Windows7's recent "I'm a PC" ad campaign with the tag line "That was my idea" effectively taps into this dynamic. We should too.

With MeeGo looming some may say it's to late or what would be the point:

To that I say , meh. The point is the dang Maemo community. If it doesn't pull all these elements together than what was the point of the last 4 or 5 years? If we don't pull all these elements together than what would be the point of a MeeGo community even bothering to listen to, or positively reacting to this communities collective voice? In this case it is all or nothing I believe. And if that is the case, then you 5 fellows have a lot of work ahead of you.

In EIPI 's interview I talked of committees as one way to help manage council tasks... These committees do not have to be manned exclusively by council members, only chaired by a member.

I believe that if these council chairs reached out and tapped on the shoulder of most forum members and asked via private message (publicly is not as effective ), many would welcome the idea of sitting on a council sub committee and contributing to the task at hand.

This would also promote the use of the mailing lists and foster greater individual community involvement.

... just sayin'

I am not trying to troll or anything, but maybe the decision people made if to vote or not was influenced by how the Council was treated in the MeeGo announcement (they weren't told anything about it) and how it reflects its real importance or influence.

No one wants to vote for "decorative" authorities.

I voted still, as an act of faith.

First off, congratulations to those elected, and to all the candidates: congratulations for making it a good election.

I think this is a good idea and would be in favor of people who gain no karma in the past year being expunged from the voter list.

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread. Maybe the new council should put them together in a list and make them some of the first orders of business?

Hi,

I got 3 or 4 emails from people with new accounts who wanted to vote. I told them they could not, and that was the end of it.

In the case of jacktanner, he had some bugzilla activity, so I spelt a grey area and sent him to the council.

In the case of a dozen others, their tmo accounts were old enough but their maemo.org accounts were not, and so I applied the instructions of the council and automatically issued a ballot.

At the cut-off point, there were about 20 people with sufficient karma who did not meet the date requirements (from memory - I could go back and give you an explicit count if you wanted). 10 of those had linked talk accounts which were not old enough, and the others had no other linked accounts.

Cheers,
Dave.

https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-announce

Dave.

I see the council has tough tasks ahead of it.
I'll be holding thumbs and hoping that It'll just increase the "maemo experiance".

A basic principle of democracy is that voters know what they are voting. If the electorate is far bigger than the people that actually know what is the Council, then there are two solutions, none of them being a more noisy campaign or a more explanatory ballot sent:

- Have a constant communication and promotion of the Council that doesn't escape to the attention of active community contributors.

and / or

- Raise the bar to get voting rights, playing with karma increase, older registration, old karma deprecation...

In absolute terms 400 voters for 5 elected posts reflects a good weight of representation! Nobody can deny that these 5 people now represent 400 Maemo contributors. Well, that is useful for what is the (otherwise humble) purpose of the Council:

It is now the responsibility of this 400 voters to make sure that the elected Council executes the mission as expected. Anybody else can just jump and help on this goal again. I haven't seen a Council member ever saying 'no, we won't pay attention to you because you did not participate in the election or you don't have enough karma, or even a maemo.org account.

It is relatively pointless to compare elections in free software projects, but as a reference: the Debian project leader was elected with 406 votes and the GNOME Foundation board was decided with 213 votes. The elections for the Fedora Board have more voters (can't find the total amount) and... anybody knows where to find the Ubuntu council election stats?

True, and the rest who didn't bother to vote can't complain :-)

I think percentages are more interesting, those results were out of electorate bodies of 1013 (40%) and 369 (57%) respectively.

This post indicates 18252 which would make 225 ballots a mere 1.2% (ie much worse than maemo.org). The one before that was a bit better with 8163 eligible voters / 297 valid ballots (3.6%).

Couldn't find that either, though this may indicate the number of eligible voters.

Congratulations to the new council. These next several months will be very challenging. I hope the council continues to welcome and represent the "average user". I wonder whether many of these "average users" (such as myself) who use this forum had not yet obtained sufficient karma to be eligible voters. A very quick analysis of the council candidate declarations indicates that two candidates who specifically indicated their concern for the "average user" did not win.

Getting those percentages in maemo.org would be quite trivial: raise the bar to an equivalent of becoming a Debian maintainer or a GNOME Foundation member and you will be there. But that would have other problems too.

This is why Perhaps is not much worth to be concerned about percentages. If the Council does great useful work with a clear benefit for the community then the response will grow. Easy.