[maemo-community] Discussion about Maemo community management...

[From: Sebastian 'CrashandDie' Lauwers]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Tim <tim at samoff.com> wrote:
> Hi,

Hi, this is the serious email.

> There's been a private conversation going on between the Maemo Community
> Council, some maemo.org employees, and some Nokia employees about the notion
> of openness/transparency, communication between the Maemo community and
> Nokia, and general community management.

*frown* As much as I understand the need for a degree of privacy, I
doubt this was one of them. Anyway, not the discussion for this, I
just wanted to point it out.

> (I.e., Did you know that most of us -- even Nokia and maemo.org employees --
> volunteer our time completely out of the scope of our regular day jobs?)

This was something I suspected, but thanks for confirming it. I hope
you have no doubt most people outside the first 3 subsets do exactly
the same. Hell, I know more than one person who volunteer regular day
job time to Maemo.

> For these reasons, I would like to propose that Nokia (at some point) think
> about allocating a budget for an official "Community Manager" (either
> technical or non-technical, although the addition of our new debmaster may
> fulfill much of the technical side of this) who can monitor and assist the
> Maemo community full-time.

I think this is an excellent idea. I think it would be quite
interesting to clarify what Quim's position is at the moment, as I get
the feeling he had this kind of role at the moment. I can understand
he doesn't do everything that is listed in the job description, yet it
would be nice to understand the difference between his position and
this proposed one.

> Currently, with the recent discussion about the next Maemo Summit, I see an
> even greater need for this position. While I think it's great that there are
> plenty of people who can help out with the planning and logistics of this
> event, it would be even more accessible (as many people are saying already)
> if there were a single person who could handle these things -- and not on a
> volunteer basis.

I don't think that having a CM would solve this issue. Remember, the
issue we are having is in the payment process, not the "finding the
person", Dave could without a problem be mandated to take care of
this.

At this point, I am more confused about the difference with Quim's
position. Could we have some more information in this area?

My 2c,

S.

-- 
question = ( to ) ? be : ! be;
      -- Wm. Shakespeare