[maemo-community] Council nomination: Andrea Grandi

[From: Andrea Grandi]

Hello,

On 12 March 2010 14:46, Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> wrote:
> Thanks Andrea. I've a few questions for the candidates, your answers
> would be appreciated:

excuse me if I hadn't replyed yet, but probably when you sent this
email I had not applied for the Council nomination yet, so I'll do it
now.

> Sprint process
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> This is the main organised point of contact between Nokia, the paid
> contributors and the community, however the maemo.org sprint process
> is quite heavy for volunteers and it often seems to be a checklist
> affair; rather than a collaborative planning exercise.
>
> 1) Do you see any flaws in it, and how do you think it can be improved?

even if we are a community, we have to think (imho) like a small
company to make things work. I explain you...

The first thing we have to do is creating a list of collaborators,
volunteers ecc... and for each of them we need to know the tasks
they're most skilled to.
For example: Person1 (db designer, web developer ecc...), Person2
(good communication skills), Person3 (developer and UI designer
ecc...).

So, when the Council make a list of "things to do" during the Sprint
Process, we already have a list of people to ask too. No need to ask
"are you good at designing a webpage...?" because we already know his
skills. Of course if we have 10 webdesigner, we don't need 10 people
every time, but of course it's better to have more people than having
few.

Important thing: we should aware karma points to people who work to a
specific task (this will make people happier to collaborate with us).

> 2) What are your thoughts on ongoing communication during the sprint?

the actual method is quite good, the only important thing is that
every person who decide to partecipate to the Sprint meeting in an
active way, make a todo-list of things to work on, so when we start
the meeting we can already make a priority list. All the community
should be encouraged to attend the meeting. At the end of it we should
make a very short summary of the discussion and publish it on the
mailing list and on Maemo Planet, not only in a wiki page.

> MeeGo
> ~~~~~
> MeeGo is, IMHO, the single biggest thing to happen to Maemo since the
> 770. In many ways, it's the opening up of the design processes that
> many of us have wanted in Maemo for so long. As Maemo as an operating
> system disappears, this will have a big effect on the community.
>
> 3) As we move from "day zero" to "day one", what do you think the
> priorities for the MeeGo community should be?

I almost have more questions than answers for this part :\

For example:

- how dows the Moblin community work?
- do they have a council like our?

For sure I think that neither Maemo must be taken over by Moblin
community, neither Moblin community must be taken over by us.

We must be sure that both community are well represented by future
MeeGo council and we must explain to community members that this
fusion can bring lot of positive things and potentiality if we are
good at managing this. Good ideas are welcome for this part.

> 4) Should leaders in the MeeGo community (whether from a Moblin or
> Maemo background) try to move the existing communities with them to
> form the MeeGo community; or should a new community form around the
> operating system and its devices?

I really think we must not destroy nor waste existing communities. We
(as part of the community) must simply adapt to a bit different
project. After all we still have Nokia, its devices, a Linux based
operating sistem, and the nice Qt libraries officially supported....
we really just need to adapt to the incoming changes, but it still
remains an (almost) opensource operating system for mobile devices.

> 4a) If yes, what steps should be taken to prevent overreactions and
> allegations of "take over" that happened when internettablettalk.com's
> theme changed to match the rest of maemo.org?

I think that in this case the "secret" is being able to merge what is
good in both communities and take the good from both. For example: the
forum? We should simply allow Moblin users and Maemo users to access
the Meego forum. This new forum should be used by both communities.
Only having the same discussion place we can be sure to collaborate.
Same thing for maemo-community, maemo-devel ecc... we should simply
all migrate to meego-community, meego-devel ecc... maybe this is not
possible for short time, since at the moment N900 still uses Maemo as
OS and Moblin is used on notebooks, but surely this is the way.

> 4b) If no, how do you see the relationship between the Maemo community
> which has been "left behind" and the MeeGo community? How does the
> Maemo community stay vibrant if large portions on moving on to Maemo's
> successor, or drifting away to other mobile platforms?

as I previously said, Maemo community should simply migrate to Meego.
We must evolve.
Giants (Nokia and Intel) are going to support MeeGo, that's all.
People must evolve not remain nostalgic :P
(I excuse myself for this radical point of view, it's only my hopinion...).

> 5) What are your thoughts about existing maemo.org resources (such as
> Extras, auto-builder, Bugzilla) as Nokia, and the paid contributors,
> look to the future?

actual resources, expecially for developers, really s**** :)

let's analize the situation... main Maemo projects are using Gitorius
to host the source code, Maemo Garage for their development mailing
list, bugs.maemo.org for bugs (while Garage has a different one),
their own web hosting to host the application website and finally
auto-builder to publish application. We should really have something
better.

Plase, really please, COPY from actually working solutions, take the
best and create something better!
For example I find Google Code very nice to host an application... its
difect? It doesn't support Git, but the rest is nice.

> Community
> ~~~~~~~~~
>
> 6) How can we encourage more, and higher quality, applications for
> Maemo - and specifically through Extras?

again: why don't we organize a MeeGo Developer Contest? Developers
like challenges and prizes :)
We should do something like the Android one and aware developers with
devices or money ecc...

This would make developing for Meego more actractive. I know some
developers that started coding for Android just because there was a
contest to win. During the development process they had the
possibility to know the Android Community better and at the end they
continued developing for that platform.

> Thanks for your time in answering these questions. Your answers are
> much appreciated.

Thanks to you for your questions and (personally) I really hope that
even you run again for the Council because we surely need experienced
people :)

Regards,

-- 
Andrea Grandi
email: a.grandi [AT] gmail [DOT] com
website: http://www.andreagrandi.it
PGP Key: http://www.andreagrandi.it/pgp_key.asc