I've set the ball rolling, and put myself forward as a candidate (the first) in the second Maemo Community Council election.
I'm proud to have been a member of the inaugural Community Council. In the last six months, we've seen a sea-change in the way Maemo is progressing:
- the first Maemo Summit, paid for by Nokia;
- community ownership of maemo.org;
- better use of Bugzilla by both Nokia and the community;
- the realistic vision of a community-led "hacker edition" in Mer;
- a webmaster, docmaster, bugmaster and now debmaster all being paid for for us;
- open communication and - importantly - progress indicators like the Maemo 5/Fremantle pre-release SDKs, which would've been unheard of back in 2006/2007.
The Council has been involved in many of these, but would claim credit for few. I believe we've truly fulfilled our role as facilitators and would like to continue my role there. We've not got everything right, but I think we've proved the idea; and that it can be a cohesive force within the community.
I think there's still work to be done, though. Nokia are being more open, and projects like Tracker and Rygel are being developed openly. Yet, Modest has slipped back into internal development; some patches to Application Manager have been merged, but the community's vision for application management in Diablo - and Fremantle - looks unlikely to have been realised. The system as a whole, and the application environment which so clearly defines the Maemo brand, are architected internally. Design decisions are taken internally.
Slowly, hopefully, we can change Nokia management into utilising the enthusiastic talent at their disposal in a way which is truly ground-breaking in the industry; with a root-to-tip collaboration between us all.
Thanks for reading this, and I'll happily answer any questions anyone has.
