[maemo-community] Request: council at maemo.org

[From: Quim Gil]

ext Ryan Abel wrote:
> On Nov 24, 2008, at 3:58 PM, Jamie Bennett wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 2008-11-23 at 17:41 -0500, Ryan Abel wrote:
>>
>>> On Nov 23, 2008, at 1:25 PM, Graham Cobb wrote:
>>>
>>>> Maybe it should be set up but my concerns still stand.
>>> . . . and this was one of our first concerns too, which is why we set
>>> our policy to address it. You'll concede that there are clearly
>>> sensitive and confidential things that the council may have to deal
>>> with, though, yes?
>> Although with a community project I can't see where the 'sensitive and
>> confidential things' would be. Is this an open effort or not?

Note that most (all?) major open source projects have "-private" lists.
As an example, the GNOME Foundation has such lists mainly to discuss
with corporate partners, prepare some of the announcements, deal with
money related issues, deal with contractors related issues, receive
feedback from community members that for whatever reasons opt not send
it to the public lists.

This is the type of private communication I would expect from the Maemo
council as a community member myself.

As a Nokia speaker towards the community and the council, I agree this
channel is useful. Actually we asked publicly in the Maemo Summit
whether the council would like to have this kind of thin layer of
private communication and the answer was yes.

99% of the copmmunication goes and will go through public spaces like
this mailing list, but as Jaffa and Ryan have pointed out there is a
couple of topics that are being discussed privately. This privacy
actually is a step forward in terms of openness since those topics had
to be dealt by Nokia alone before, without any disclosure of discussion
with the community.

All the topics discussed will be public soon, and the only
confidentiality involved is the fact that we bring the topic some weeks
before for sharing and discussion. No really sensitive information
(Nokia has a strict policy about sharing confidential information
without NDAs in place).

Some examples:

- Proposal to grow the maemo.org team with a new role. The council to
get the management role since this team reports to the community.Nokia
to provide funds. The discussion might involve budgets, evaluation of
current maemo.org team members, prospects of opening new positions...

- Proposal to bring major improvements to maemo.org that would require a
different level of commitment/funding/scope from Nokia. Preliminary
discussion whether there is a rough agreement between the parties before
 bringing the discussion publicly.

- First Fremantle SDK release. As you know it's coming. Nokia can't
commit to an exact date yet but there is enough ground to start sharing
what is coming so the council and the maemo.org team can get themselves
organized - instead of finding out the news on a busy morning. This was
requested by the maemo.org team even before the council was created.

- Maemo Summit budget. Nokia is open to share the budget of the past
event in order to plan the next one with the community. It's ok to share
the broad numbers publicly, but there might be reasons why any of the
parties involved (c-base, sponsored participants) wouldn't feel
comfortable seeing all the specific amounts being discussed publicly.

Yes, it's a gray area and needs to be as thin as possible. But it helps
getting things done. As timeless says, it's good to trust the council
you vote, and if not then vote a different one. Again this is the usual
practice in the majority of complex open source projects.

-- 
Quim Gil