[maemo-community] Council thread : who wants my vote - and why?

[From: Ryan Pavlik]

Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Thanks for starting this thread! I was wondering when someone was going to.
> 
> David Greaves wrote:
>> I have a vote.
>>
>> Who wants it?
>>
>> What are you going to do if you get it?
> 
> I'd ask a couple of slightly different questions (hopefully the answers
> will answer your questions too):
> 
> What do you bring to the council that no other candidate does?
> 
> What do you expect to achieve on/with the council? What's your top
> priority issue to resolve, and how do you plan to help make that happen?
> 
> Where do you want to see the council at the end of your term in 6 months?
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.
> 

My top priority within the council is clarifying the roles of our
community contexts/media (the various mailing lists, maemo.org and wiki,
ITt, etc.) and ensuring that each of the subcommunities (users, power
users/testers, and developers) has a primary source of information,
meeting place, and entry point.

In my work with AbiWord, I've found it hard to locate the Maemo
development talent to resolve some bugs that I just lacked the platform
development experience to tackle.  In testing AbiWord, it was difficult
to reach only those users (the power users) willing to work with a buggy
port and report bugs when found.  I also see, in my reading of ITt, a
lot of good ideas, a lot of grumbling whether founded or unfounded, and
a lot of bugs mentioned that are not making back "upstream."  These are
the disconnects I see and mention in my candidate statement - members of
the subcommunities not finding each other and not effectively
communicating between the subcommunities.

My approach to this is seeing it as a communication and clarity problem.
 We have great communication tools (not without room for improvement),
but we have too many of them without a clear mission for each.  While I
don't suggest limiting community communication growth, I do think that
for the media controlled by maemo.org and close affiliates, we should
establish a clear mission (an "arche" if you are in to Greek philosophy)
around which the effectiveness of that medium should be judged and
further enhancements centered.  With a clear focus and mission with
respect to each media, whether informal or in a "mission statement", I
think we can do a better job serving those sub-communities as an
organizational framework.

That's the overarching idea I'm working for - I have more concepts on
perhaps a more practical level.  As a council, we have the ability and
the duty to direct new members of the community, new contributors, to
where their efforts can be most be felt.  We need to evaluate the needs
of the platform and the applications - what do we have well covered in
terms of use cases?  What is still without even basic treatment?  What
existing solutions could use additional developer-hours to bring them up
to a great quality level?

About me: I've been doing independent technology consulting (repair,
networking and sysadmin, web design) and graphic design for over five
years now.  I have been working with AbiWord for about as long.
Personally, I am in my last year of undergraduate university studies,
after which I will be pursuing a PhD in computer science.  My personal
fields of interest are varied but include human-computer interaction as
a primary theme. I have been studying user-centered design for several
years.  I have all three Maemo tablets, have worked on the AbiWord Maemo
port, and maintain the official AbiWord packages for Ubuntu in
collaboration with the Debian maintainer, whose packages are used in
Ubuntu after package syncs.  I am a believer in the possibilities
presented by both the hardware and software that we are working with,
and I remain convinced that polish and coordination can take the
platform to the next level.

I hope you have found this informative - I would appreciate your vote
for the maemo.org Community Council!

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
www.cleardefinition.com

#282  +  (442) -  [X]
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