Can we agree at least that "talk.meego.com" needs to start from scratch, since the MeeGo project starts from scratch? Just renaming talk.mamo.org doesn't make any sense to me, even if the legal aspect (privacy data, etc) was clear, which is not. Maemo 1-5 and OS200n are not MeeGo. All the apps discussed here will need to make their MeeGo API compatibility check. 99% of the posts in this forum are not related or relevant to MeeGo today.

Why would the MeeGo project want to take this? Please look at the possibility of this move from the perspective of a non-Maemo guy e.g. someone with a background in Moblin, Android, OpenMoko, OpenEmbedded, Ubuntu Mobile, Qtopia, Pandora etc etc. How do you explain to them than their/your/our forum starts day 1 with half million posts basically off-topic from a MeeGo point of view?

What matters is the people, and there is nothing stopping anybody from registering at meego.com. If someone here is not intersted personally about doing this step, then why bother about organizing complex user/content migrations.

MeeGo is a new community project and it makes total sense that the new community members step in by their own feet. Nobody has made a big fuzz about registering to the mailing lists and we have some already, being active and useful.

Not to mention they may have just signed up to meego.com to post their post only to find they've signed up to the wrong forum and now need to sign up somewhere else to post about the same problem again.

It may not be the end of the world for the community, but it's certainly not going to be the best end user experience or endear that new user to his new MeeGo device.

I agree. I would think when MeeGo starts appearing in Nokia devices, most if not all of the forums here at TMO now will be moved under a "Maemo Devices" category,. A new "MeeGo Devices" category and sub-forums will then be created.

If that's the biggest sticking point to moving this forward then Yes, fine, let's start it from scratch *as long as* we don't fragment the community any further and push people to talk.maemo.org whenever they open their post with "I've got a new Nokia MeeGo device..."

talk.meego.com will be the new community and talk.maemo.org will, I suppose, die a natural death if that is what ultimately happens. Anyone wishing to spend time in both camps will be a real trooper - ultimately though I think most will migrate from talk.maemo.org to talk.meemo.com over time.

Later this year Maemo5 users with PR1.2/Qt may be confused when they have a largely MeeGo "compatible" OS (from an API point-of-view) - should it be discussed on maemo.org or meego.com? - but perhaps that's another bridge to cross when it happens!

Good that we are starting to put concrete examples:

http://ubuntuforums.org/
Good reference but there are some deep differences that need to be taken into account when comparing.

- Ubuntu users are first Ubuntu users, and then users of whatever hardware Ubuntu is installed. Most of them installed the OS themselves in a piece of hardware that came with another OS. This means that they are well aware of the difference between OS and device, and they have a clear priority over the OS and the apps available for Ubuntu. MeeGo will be also installed in e.g. netbooks, but it is expected that the majority of users will reach first a device that comes with MeeGo pre-installed. This also means that the possibility of getting MeeGo vendors interested in own user communities is higher than the same possibility for Ubuntu vendors, simply because there are not that many.

- The Ubuntu experience is mostly the same across devices. Some drivers here, some branding there but once things are setup Ubuntu is the basically same Ubuntu everywhere and everybody polls from the same repos. Now compare the situation with MeeGo, offering 5 UX references and (most important) the possibility of having vendor specific repositories. Ubuntu apps are available for everybody but what about the apps pre-installed in a Nokia MeeGo device? Many of them probably not available for non-Nokia devices.

- The software in Ubuntu repositories is mostly free as in freedom and in beer. Alright, some non-free as in freedom but still gratis and freely downloadable. The commercial software aspect around Ubuntu is minor, if not negligible. This is a situation very different from MeeGo, that being an open source platform needs to be successful attracting commercial apps that again might or might not be available across all users. Also in the case of open source you can at least get support from any developer interested in the project and willing to help. In the case of proprietary software the dependence from the owners wills are higher.

So fundamentally the Ubuntu forums are populated by a quite homogeneous community of users that are aware of common elements like Linux, open source, software platform, common repositories... The MeeGo users will find themselves in a different situation. A core group will also care about Linux, open source, software platform, common repositories... but it is expected that a majority will actually care primarily about the device they got, with a customized UI and a bunch of apps, some of them unique to their vendor and some of them common for everybody.

We can see this as a fragmented community or we can see this as a very diverse community.

Fine, but if you consider that Ubuntu is mainly a Linux distribution as is MeeGo, and there are different device categories for Ubuntu just as there might be for MeeGo (in addition to phones), are the differences really that great?

Granted there will be different UX references, but presumably that will devolve into vendor specific discussion within each vendor/UX sub-forum? Is it really necessary to create a separate and dedicated forum on another server for those devices using one of the 5 UX, or would 5UX sub-forum within meego.com be a better option? I'd certainly go with the latter (or however it needs to be sliced, grouping discussions at the highest level considered necessary) and if we're starting from scratch, what is the objection?

A better example may be the Android forum though - I appreciate it's not an official Google forum (they don't seem to have one) but it's illustrative of how diverse interests can co-exist within a single forum - even network operators!

Perhaps somewhere in between is what is needed for MeeGo, but I really don't think it will be wise to fragment this community any more than is necessary - it's had enough knocks over the years.

Another example mentioned here: http://androidforums.com/

Or wasn't http://www.talkandroid.com/android-forums/ the "more official" forum? It's really difficult to tell who is who in the world of Android forums.

Actually the Android case is an example of clearly separate forums for developers and rest of the world.

The official Android "forums" are http://developer.android.com/resourc...ty-groups.html

http://androidforums.com/ is a private initiative from http://phandroid.com/ and both sites ar full of advertisement. I guess it's someone's business, and in it sense of course their interest is to embrace as much as possible.

Let's look at the situation around e.g. the Droid:

http://www.droidforums.net/ exists, from the same company putting up http://www.nexusoneforum.net/
HTC tries to pull their own Android forum
http://community.htc.com/na/htc-foru...f/default.aspx
Verizon too: http://forums.verizon.com/t5/Android...ndroid_Devices

About the Nexus One, apart from the mentioned private forum there is the official from Google: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android?hl=en
Guess what, T-Mobile has also a forum: http://forums.t-mobile.com/t5/Nexus-One/bd-p/Nexus_One

And there are several other Android "community" forums there.

So the Android case (that actually as a platform/community structure is more directly comparable to MeeGo than Ubuntu) is not an example of unified forum, but the contrary: it is perhaps an example of extreme forum fragmentation telling us about a scenario we also want to avoid.

However, how much can we do to prevent that? Why device vendors, operators and private businesses would act differently with MeeGo?

I agree with you with option 1, except if Drupal forum is as horrible as some said, :-) then it is option 2.

Thanks!

My experience here is end-users will look for support for their specific device. They won't care about the different UX's because honestly, majority won't know what UX they have nor what it is called.

I've been running a Palm OS enthusiast site for 9 years already it has become clear the end-users like to see a forum for their specific device rather than say a Palm OS version forum that encompasses like 10 different devices of different brands/models. Members with the same device are more united and helpful to each other, plus they can always use search whenever they are looking for something they can't find in their device's forum.

Each device will probably have something unique (form factor, maybe a new camera, a different GPS, an FM radio, etc.). A forum for each device from my experience, works, from the end-user perspective.

As for apps, that's a different matter.

I wonder how many times the same question has been asked on each of those Android forums (thanks for finding them all), and because there are so many the usefulness of each is diminished?

I suppose we could discuss this forever. I've made my point, I'd rather we had a unified MeeGo community forum with discussion at all levels and as much vendor representation as possible.

How the MeeGo forum is sliced and diced I'm not really bothered, just as long as we don't push device owners elsewhere when they come looking for help (unless a vendor doesn't want representation on MeeGo of course, but that would be bizarre).