[maemo-community] Council nomination: Andrew Flegg

[From: Andrew Flegg]

Hi all,

Once again, I've decided to throw my hat into the ring.

Name: Andrew Flegg (Jaffa)
Commercial affiliation: none

As with Tim, I'm an old hand and the current chair of the council. The
last 6 months have been interesting and challenging for the community,
coming as they did after the announcement of the merger of Moblin and
Maemo teams at Intel and Nokia and to form MeeGo.

The thing I've learned is that Nokia's planning didn't seem to extend
to the community and Intel (not having much of a Moblin community)
didn't think much of it either. This has resulted in fear, uncertainty
and doubt. The new MeeGo community is also making wholly new mistakes,
for which we need to bring our extensive experience of maemo.org and
the Maemo Community to bear; for example, the ability of community
packages to depend on each other. It's also entirely unclear whether
meego.com should be the home for MeeGo device discussions, let alone
Harmattan or MeeGo-Harmattan HE on N900.

The MeeGo community is forming, however the Maemo community feels like
it's stagnating. There are a few reasons for this, however the big one
is that of fear & uncertainty, as I mentioned above. We all want a
continual updates to our device's OS, a steady stream of enhancements
and a vibrant ecosystem. What's unclear is the best way of achieving
that:

 * Core MeeGo Handset port to N900
 * MeeGo-Harmattan port to N900
 * Maemo 5 Community SSU

Certainly in the short term, the last one is the easiest to achieve
and can even provide benefits whilst waiting for (hopefully) PR1.3.
That's what I support MohammadAG's efforts in this area; and hope we
can get some real traction there. Hopefully the other two will
contribute to each other and they will become realistic day-to-day
alternatives to Maemo 5. But they're not there yet.

The budget for maemo.org is being reduced and the number of hours
contracted for the paid staff is decreasing. Nokia are also less
interested in Maemo and its community. Therefore, if elected, I plan
to:

  * Clarify the position of the paid team and what we can
    expect from them (a task which is currently underway[1])
  * Hold a referendum in this term, no later than February 2011
    on the topic of whether the Community Council needs to
    continue for a future term, and have discussions about
    the governance of maemo.org.

Hopefully, by January a new device will be out and we will be able to
see the effect of consumer-quality MeeGo devices on the Maemo
community; and it'll be clearer how the MeeGo community is operating.

Since making the decision to run again (I was in the founding council,
chaired the following council and am chair again now) we've had a set
of new candidates come forward; so I revisited this decision. I think,
however, some form of continuity would be useful at this critical
time.

If you have any questions for me, please don't hesitate to ask. I also
encourage people to come up with questions for the other candidates.

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

[1] http://maemo.org/community/maemo-community/maemo-org_team_meeting_tuesday_the_14th/

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council chair