Dear Community,

The time has come for Council elections.

Nominations for candidates will open on Oct 21, 2013. As has been observed previously, nomination periods have to be extended due to a lack of candidates coming forward hence the purpose of this post is to clarify what Council actually stands for and an appeal for candidates to throw their names into the hat.

Over the past ~12 months, the Community has gone through major changes with the most overwhelming being the transfer of ownership from the "safer" sanctuary of Nokia to the "riskier" sanctuary of the Community.

Our infrastructure is currently being hosted for 50 euro a year at IPHH with options for them to extend it annually. On the other hand, there are interesting projects on-going; namely Neo900 and Jolla's imminent device.

Issues that were present with the previous Hildon Foundation Board have been ironed out too with the presence of logical Directors.

The Council now has a merged rule-set for both the Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council. We no longer need to run two elections, and one election for a Council body that will officially have both the titles will be the norm now onwards.

The Council's main role is to ensure the lights remain switched on for all Community infrastructure as well as to help any efforts from the Community that might need co-ordination. The Council is the voice of the Community-at-large and has a vital "red button" which if pressed can call for elections of the Hildon Foundation Board if at anytime it suspects the Board of running contrary to the Community's interests. Re-read, this is an important point!

Hence, in effect the Council is a very important body that requires dedicated candidates. From the current Council, joerg_rw, qwazix and I have been involved heavily since the past ~12months with all the migration work hence we have decided not to stand again for the Council. In short, we all need a bit of rest, and need new members to step in.

Therefore, we humbly appeal to capable and willing members to be steadfast in declaring their candidature for the upcoming elections.

In conversations with a few members a common theme emerges of members unwilling to stand for elections mainly due to doubts in their abilities to be able to carry out Council work. Let us assure everyone that you don't need to do technical work nor do you need to dedicate a large amount of hours per week to Council work.

There is a dedicated techstaff that keeps the infrastructure running and maintained while there is a weekly Council meeting which would usually suffice for the whole week's work.

So to end, we repeat our appeal to all to seriously consider running for elections!

Interested candidates please post your introduction here in this thread!

Regards,
Q3 2013 Community Council

So many views and no candidate declarations yet? Common people please step forward!

hmm I believe a lot have happened - all good stuff, and is surpriced there are no showing interrest.

This is my formal acceptance and request for participating in the upcoming council election.
My Maemo account username is NielDK and IRL Niel Nielsen.
I have been an active member of this community for a good four years, and have been member of the council previously.
Possibly it was the hardest time, since it was the transition from leaving a community that was regulated and sponsored by Nokia, and we had to form a council and set initial regulations / election of a legal board of director.
I did not succeed very well during this period. There were a lot of internal disputes and fights between concil member / board members and directors.
However, we got things started, and the council that was elected for the next period did a very good job in sorting out the mess.
It is sad to see that none apparently wants to continue, but hopefully the next council will do even better.
Secondly, why I am not happy about my period, was due to a load of personal issues, which I can say now have come to a (good) end, and I am getting hold of my life, and gaining more time to again be active member.
I have contibuted within this community as an active member, helping other members with issues, solving problems that arose from Nokia stopping support for N9xx device.
Also, I have been developing applications, utilities and libraries, that all now reside on openrepos - another great initiative to solve the lack of support/updates from Nokia.
For the most, my work have been consisiting in developing improvements to kernel, but also tools and libraries that is useful for pentesting.
I hope that I will be considered, and do feel asured that the next council will step up, and further improve our community and support for our devices, to have a life beyond the expectations of Nokia.
Thanks


/Nieldk

I think people were waiting for nominations to be opened rather than post early and then remember to have to email the mailing list to actually nominate themselves.

Nomination period open since 21., according to thedead1440's post #1
/j

know this will formally be done in the first council meeting (friday evening, GMT?) of the new Council but maybe the members of the current council could give

• brief overview of what was done
• what seem to be the big points that may (as far as they can be anticipated) need attention in the coming year

couple of questions i'm wondering about (but i haven't come to TMO anymore except if i had an issue with N900, thus maybe i'm the only one in the dark about this )

• Neo900 - is it something the Council is involved with as such or is it a personal interest of some of its current members?
• what happened to the Board of Directors? still in charge of organizing financing (& knows gawd what else...) or has that become a (de facto) responsibility for Council as well?

Hm. ok well that goes that theory. Maybe they're ambivalent about the "the last 12 months were really hard and time consuming but you should definitely run as it wont take much of your time!" vibe. Shrug. Fine:

"Hi I'm jcharpak and I am running for a seat on the Maemo Council. I've been a proud owner of a 770 as well as an N800, and have purchased a 64GB N9 in the last year when it became available and reasonably priced in the U.S. I'm a programmer/analyst (that's just a fancy term for what used to be called a computer programmer) My area of expertise is database stuff, specially Oracle, sql and pl/sql, along with oracle Forms and oracle reports, none of which is available for Nokia Mids or smartphones (with the exception of sql in sqlite). I've dabbled in plenty of other languages (C, C++, java, python, ada!) but not really fluent in any of them. I appreciate the work being done at openrepos.net but wish we could add an N9 section to the maemo.org autobuilder instead. Still it's good to have something as I believe Nokia announced it is not allowing new applications to be submitted to the Nokia Store. I like romantic dinners and long walks on the beach...just kidding I hate long walks on the beach. It's either really sandy or really rocky not to mention the whole walking part. I'd much rather stay at home, reading all sorts of technical blogs and dreaming of one day building a "trek" style game written in python and qml. I'm a big proponent of open source, else why would I be here? Please consider voting for me on the Maemo Council."

(I'm jcharpak and I approved this message)

HiFo BoD got re-elected as I promised on last council elections. It got a associated council, as I promised during last council elections. MCC and HFC got unified, as I promised during last council elections. Currently HiFo BoD is performing fine, given the mess the former BoD left us to clean it up.
And no, council is not - and will not be - involved in managing the finances of maemo community. Council is here to decide what to finance and what not, BoD exists to execute and control those decisions.

cheers
jOERG

just did that ¦-)
who has / where is the red button to call for a re-election of the Council?
if it is such an important organ, isn't all the more important to be able to "pull the brakes"?

It's called "announcing re-elections of both entities (HiFo BoD and [HiFo] council)", both entities can call for it, and you find it in the bylaws of HiFo. The fact that - no matter which side initiates those re-elections - always both entities finish their current term, makes it pretty safe from being abused. All the power to the community and those who actually care to vote.

/j