http://flors.wordpress.com/2008/05/3...aemo-community

The opinion of the ITt folks is very relevant to this question. Please leave your comments, either here or in the original blog post. Thanks!

I believe that maemo.org should be a meeting place for everybody interested in the platform, be it open source or closed source developer, somebody who designs a new theme, or writes a usefuul tutorial. They all bring something new and exciting for us.
However, maemo.org should be opened also for regular users (or maybe "educated" users) because without users the whole circus maemo loses its purpose.

Educated users maybe, but Maemo.org is NOT the right site for casual users. Even the name maemo is wrong for casual users because you never really see "maemo" anywhere on the tablet in normal use.

The kind of tablet user who just wants to surf the web, check their e-mail and make Skype calls is not going to get anything useful at all from maemo.org.

Hopefully Nokia is working on an upgraded version of Tableteer so that casual users can go there, and hardcore users can go to maemo.org.

The 2nd question ("What if development would be the core of a wider area around collaboration?") reflects a good thought and is almost reality but has a limited scope. What is the non-development part of the community? Feedback? Translation? Artwork? Users helping users? Maybe, but this is not an all to revolutionary concept for open platforms.

I'd be very, very reluctant to accept the 2nd proposal (opening maemo.org for closed-source projects). To be honest, mostly I'm rejecting it because it feels wrong, maybe even dangerous. Maybe it's because with closed source projects we have to assume they follow their own agenda. They keep things secret. They take from the community, but they don't give back. Even with the one project you refer to for "releasing soon, often, listening to feedback" - how would it help having such projects on an open developer platform? They get their feedback anyway and by their closed nature, they're not able to contribute anything to the community. (In fact, I still wonder why they're closed at all and simply don't trust the whole thing too much.)
To put it short, I'm afraid closed projects wouldn't be equal players on maemo.org. They might benefit while not giving back. I think it's much more important to have a place where developers of free code can bundle their forces, a place that enables them to do better and do more.

krisse, I do not think that maemo.org should focus on casual users, but I believe it should allow them to join the community simply if they decide to. Your casuals user won't search for what you can do more on the tablet, but there are many curious users out there. My girlfiend is not ever going to program anything, but she can provide valuable feedback that this new feature X in application Y does not make it yet for her. In current maemo.org the download section is oriented towards casual, lite more experienced, users.

benny, a closed source project cannot take anything from the community by just being on maemo.org They can make use of some products of the community (like using open source library) but they will do it regardless of being on maemo or not. But they cannot decide over community or take something from it: "next two hours will fanoush debug our crappy application instead of doing one of his amazing hacks." Community can decide to give them something, but they cannot take it.
It was almost obvious that the closed application thought was canola, I believe it is one of the most successful applications for itt. I do not see reason it could not be on maemo.org

Maemo.org should not be aimed at casual users at all, because it frightens casual users away. We have to keep casual users away from maemo.org, that site should only really be seen by those interested in software development.

The tablets already have an unfair reputation as being only for hardcore tech fans, and the maemo.org site reinforces this reputation very strongly.

Casual users who are thinking about buying a tablet will take one look at maemo.org and buy an iPod Touch instead.

I did a big long detailed rant about this issue in another thread

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...&postcount=205

right.
being successful doesn't justify being closed. i dont see the point of offering the infrastructure of a platform like maemo.org to those who could well do without. maemo.org isn't all for free. it eats resources. someone pays for it. the point is that those who contribute to all the small open projects there would never be able to keep an infrastructure close to what maemo.org provides up and running, they depend on it.

i don't see why we should be offering this infrastructure to the closed projects. they chose not to be part of the community, they chose to play their own game, so why offer them free beer at the party?
They can take: technical resources, public attention, work of community members, etc.

If there were two projects on maemo.org, skype and some new open voip client, I wouldn't want skype to take away one minute of time any community member invests in feedback/bug reports/... from the other, competing, free project. Closed projects have the resources anyway. They pay people to do what open projects need to achieve through community work. Letting them enter a platform that is, in fact, the only one where free and open maemo development takes place means having them enter a direct competition over the community resources there with the projects that need those resources much more. I'm afraid this could turn out bad for some free projects in the end.

Yeah, definitely keep maemo.org away from the casual users.

To slightly digress... looking at the pages referenced (which I assume are the guiding articles for Maemo's development):

https://wiki.maemo.org/index.php/100Days
https://wiki.maemo.org/index.php/2010_Agenda

I wonder if there's a similar effort to direct the growth of Maemo's functionality? IE: Targeting the development\availability of PIM, LBS (Location based service), etc. I think it's a crucially missing point, given Nokia's hands-off approach so far...

Yup, I agree it frightens casual users away. But I do not believe it is due to overly technical content but poor organization of things and "cheap", unelegant design. I think it is not right to turn possible community members away by creating too big gap between a page "for dummies" like tableteer and ubergeek maemo.org. This gap may be too big for many people to make a jump.

If you take itTalk for example, it is a place where both newbies and developers can coexist peacefully. And both sides of community win on this cooperation.