[maemo-community] Improving maemo community

[From: Quim Gil]

This is a very interesting post, thank you!

ext Valerio Valerio wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm new in the maemo community, in the last few weeks I started
> searching for more informations where to start helping in the maemo
> community, so I want to describe my experience  and give a some
> suggestions to try to improve the community and help newcorners to joint in.
> 
> 1- Getting start/where to start ?:
> I found a lot of information in maemo.org <http://maemo.org> on this
> topic, I had no problem understanding who maemo works and how to start
> using the maemo tools, garage or wiki. I only found a small lack in the
> wiki, I can't found any wiki editing guidelines (I think this is a
> attempt to do that: http://wiki.maemo.org/Beta/Introduction), if this
> exist, it should be easily reached by new users,  those guidelines will
> prevent some mistakes and also the wiki will looks more organized.

True. This is the kind of info expected to be in the Help link:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Help:Contents

There is also http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_writers_crash_course

But this plus all the other potential entry points to contributors
should be listed in a very visible http://wiki.maemo.org/Get_involved
page (that currently doesn't exist.


> 2- Now I have my programming environment setup, where I can help ?
> I can't found anything about this, I only found some community tasks.
> One thing that I think that may help is more or less described here :
> http://wiki.maemo.org/Pushing_a_maemo.org_task.

As you point out, the current process we have is for maemo.org tasks but
not for software development itself. Surely there is a garage project
willing to get help and probably there is a Maemo hacker that could be
interested. But they don't find each other.

> My idea is have a table
> like the one in the button of the page referred, with tasks, those task
> can also have some difficult level/expected duration, the users can
> request for a task , the user should provide logs of his progresses, on
> the others side a maemo community member can watch this page and resolve
> any problem that occur (a user assigned to a task for a long time
> without any work...). This task list can also have small bugs tasks and
> requests for functionalities to.

For what is worth, garage has some features in this direction. There is
this "Project Opening" link in the main nav bar:
https://garage.maemo.org/people/

Actually there is currently one "position" open for a theme tester:
https://garage.maemo.org/people/viewjob.php?group_id=754&job_id=21

Is it perhaps better to promote this system and make it more visible?

About people willing to help in something, the user profiles already
have fields for areas of interest (documentation etc) and there would be
a way to make this interest more explicit. Imagine that you could click
not only "Interested in" but also "Available for help". Therefore
projects looking for hackers, testers, writers... would have a way to
find the volunteers, broadcast a message to them.


> Other thing that can be good for newcorners is a wish list page, here
> the users can found some ideas to start coding some new software, the
> wish list can should be divided by categories and can also have a
> category to request 'ports' of Linux applications to maemo (the list
> already exist here:http://wiki.maemo.org/Software_wish-list, but is a
> little bit confuse).

That list is also mainly for Nokia. Most features there can't be
provided by a volunteer so easily.
http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Brainstorming_new_features should take your
use case into account!

I'm feeling the pain these days because I'd like to push an online chess
killer app for Maemo and I could volunteer in the planning and testing
departing from one of the existing chess apps. I'm unsure about where to
make the call, though. Imagine a regular user with a great idea.


> I think the rest of the wiki and the maemo.org <http://maemo.org> page
> is in the right place, only require some love already documented in the
> wiki :).
> 
> I also have a question, when a user create a new software/port exists a
> place where the user can 'publicity' his new software ? Is a good
> conduit send this announce to the maemo lists ?

http://maemo.org/downloads/ should be enough. If the project is hosted
in garage then you can use the News feature that might get your news to
http://maemo.org/news/ and from there can even reach the homepage.

btw in the last discussions there has been many people saying that
Planet is the main reference. Please rethink whether the advanced
http://maemo.org/news/ - http://maemo.org/news/latest.xml should your
default references instead. All the planet entries are available there
anyway and you have more relevant sources aggregated as well.

More people monitoring and rating News would provide a better selection
at the home, highlight and http://maemo.org/news/items.xml for the mass
of people following the default news entry points.

> I'm in the Linux world for a couple of years, for the things that I saw
> in the last weeks, maemo appear to be one of the more organized open
> source community's, congratulations to all the people behind the
> maemo.org <http://maemo.org>  site.
> 
> Keep the great works.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> -- 
> Valério Valério

-- 
Quim Gil
marketing manager, open source
Maemo Software @ Nokia