[maemo-community] Election: September 2009 - Questions for Candidates

[From: gary liquid]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Ryan Abel <rabelg5 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Since nobody seems to be asking, I'll go ahead and kick things off
> (some of these have been covered in the announcement emails, but I'll
> go ahead and ask them explicitly). ;)
>
> 1. Care to share a little history about yourself and why you want to
> serve on the council?
>

I have been active in the community for the last 18months hacking away at my
liqbase app and learning about various ideas and interactions on the
devices.
i have wanted to develop hand held simple apps for a long time and did not
find a viable solution until I discovered the Nokia devices running maemo.

in my dayjob (which I no longer have..), i have spent the last 10 years as a
visual basic developer in a small company maintaining numerous projects and
ensuring our customers had the best experience possible in a difficult,
supposedly uncomputerisable environment with complex parameters.

i have always enjoyed hacking and testing and have never been one to turn
down a challenge.


>
> 2. Is there any particular experience or event that helped you decide
> to run?
>

yes, a great many people talking in IRC and pestering me to stand!


> 3. What do you believe qualifies you to serve on the council?
>

i have a great amount of experience around all parts of the maemo sphere, I
have spoken to and discussed different aspects of the community and system
as a whole and have a good relationship with many of the members of both the
community and Nokia staff.
by working together we can build better applications and give a stronger
experience to the end users and stand proud at our accomplishments.
the relationship nokia has with the maemo community is a shining beacon for
collaboration that many companies are envious of and this bodes well for the
future.


>
> 4. Where would you like to see the Maemo Community in 6 months?
>

i would like to see the community working together and standing towards a
common goal.


>
> 5. Do you have any specific ideas about how to get us there?
>

strong leadership, and lots of bacon.
there is no point in talking about making changes, actions speak louder than
words.
even if things do not work or are incorrect in their implementation, we
should try anyway.


>
> 6. What do you believe to be the biggest problem facing the Maemo
> Community today?
>

toolkit infighting.

maemo is a community built on linux.
the principle doctrine of linux is freedom of choice.

you are free to choose the components needed to build the system you want.

each of the toolkits available has different strengths, weaknesses and
impracticalities,  but each has a common thread:

good solid applications can be written in any of them.

stop fighting about which is being used and that one is not identical to the
other and start writing the best applications you can with the tools you are
comfortable.

I am a firm believer in good solid code and would hate to see hard work
thrown away just because one side or the other forced a decision on us.
the toolkits can coexist and when a new replacement application comes to the
surface (using whichever toolkit) it will be embraced by the community and
will replace the functionality of the old one.
spending time rewriting existing solid code "just because" is not a good use
of time, energy or resources and leads to bugs and problems being
re-evaluated all over again.


>
> 7. What role do you envision for the community council you would serve
> on?
>

i hope the community council will serve as community leaders and bring focus
and direction to the coding and collaboration efforts.
hoping to find a path to bring hard working developers documentors artists
designers and users who are eager to get involved and point them in the
right direction to best make use of their skills and energies.


> 8. Finally, you suckers have _no_ idea what you're getting into.
> Ehehehe. *eg*
>

you were the beta council - you had more bugs to fix than us.
thank you for your hard work Ryan and the other esteemed members of the
previous councils.



(additional question from jaffa)
9. What do you think of the maemo.org sprint process? Have you ever
attended one of the IRC meetings? If so, what did you think? How could
the process be improved?

i like the sprint processes and irc meetings, it works for different groups,
however the timing of the meetings and organisation required to bring
everyone together around household commitments and timezones has always been
hard.
i believe the current members of the council and nokia/maemo employees find
them a good way to kickstart their activities for the period and they get
good results.
we should however have a look at whether there is a need to optimize this
process and see if there are any other additional methods for collaboration.
meetings in person are always beneficial though entirely impractical on a
weekly or even monthly basis, but I believe it would be benficial to setup
in person sessions for the principle members to get together and hammer out
major planning steps for the next cycle.
the summit is one such massive meetup!
i look forward to seeing all of you guys there.


gary birkett

open source
open heart
open future




> --
> Ryan Abel
> Maemo Community Council member
>
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>
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