[maemo-community] Election process referendum

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Monday 02 February 2009 20:12:29 Ryan Abel wrote:
> On Feb 2, 2009, at 9:12 AM, Graham Cobb wrote:
> > Maybe
> > that is the way it should be: maybe the council **should** represent
> > contributors rather than users, but we should at least get the
> > opinion of the
> > users on whether they care.
>
> Dave also hit the nail on the head here, but I'll elaborate a bit.
>
> The Council isn't in place as a consumer activism group. We're here
> for the *community* and its members (i.e., contributors), which is
> only a subset of all users (i.e., owners). 

When I said "users" I didn't mean tablet users, I meant Maemo.org users, who I 
consider to be just as much members of the community as the contributors.  
Are you suggesting the "community" in my local small town only consists of 
the shopkeepers?   There are well over a thousand (probably many more -- I 
got bored flicking through the pages in the user listing) people with Maemo 
accounts and fewer than 25 karma points.  Many more than have more than 25 
points.

All these people have visited maemo.org and created accounts.  Why should the 
council only represent people who contribute to the Maemo community, not all 
those who are trying to use our downloads, our documentation, our 
community-contributed software, our forums, etc?

I'm not saying that the council is doing a bad job of dealing with those 
people's concerns (the new site, the debmaster, all these things are helping 
those users) but why on earth don't they get a vote?

I must admit, I completely fail to see why we do not give a vote to anyone who 
has a maemo.org account.  Can someone explain the rationale?

Graham