[maemo-community] Election announcement article (formatting & questions)

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Aug 19, 2011, at 10:49, Graham Cobb wrote:

> On Friday 19 August 2011 03:51:17 Sunny B wrote:
>> Agreed.  The referendum is rather open-ended and permits a variety of
>> governance options.  Deriving from your comment earlier, the current
>> referendum wording "authorizes" the council so the objections to binding
>> nature are no longer on point.

Drop the referendum. Drop any notion of "authorization" or "binding" agreement. Maemo.org will succeed only on the work of volunteers and you cannot force a volunteer to do what they don't want to do.

Encourage the next council candidates to state clearly what they think should happen and how they'll go an do it. If people vote for them then that is what people want to do. 

I personally think the Maemo community and software is valuable. I think the community should be preserved this way;

1. The existing web master has the experience to continue maintaining the site and should be encouraged to do so. 
2. The existing forums are popular and should remain under the control of the current administrator of the forums.
3. The infrastructure team should continue to maintain the infrastructure, much like jaffa described.
4. Maemo software which has originally derived from Debian should have its patches returned to Debian.
5. Those developers who are interested in bringing their software into Debian should be provided a clear and friendly path to allow them to do so. 
6. The "maemo.org" domain name needs to be sold at a symbolic sum to the community, say 1 Euro. I maintain that the name belongs to an "organization" (hence .org) and that organization is the community of volunteers who've built up the community through their common interests. 
7. Independence from an entity or organization that can pull the plug on maemo.org should be prioritized

Yes - there are a ton of details to work out, like who pays for what and how we can balance the bills for infrastructure with a community project. (I don't think we want to have the banner ad discussion again.) But those details are what the council should have to slog through. 

Now comes the hard work, but if the council is successful then the end result will be well worth it.

Regards,

Jeremiah