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

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Friday 19 August 2011 10:19:00 Jeremiah Foster wrote:
> 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 think the referendum has value, mostly as a poll.  I think there is a case 
that the maemo community should drop the infrastructure and just become a 
forum and a wiki, like many other open source communities working on devices 
without (official) support from the manufacturers (think TiVo, OpenWRT, 
OpenStora, just to mention three I have participated in).  

I think it would be useful to get the views of the community (after a month of 
debate) on whether they see that as the answer or want to preserve the much 
larger community infrastructure we currently have in Maemo.org.

The debate on the referendum topic would promote further discussion of your 
ideas for closer integration with Debian, ideas for closer links to MeeGo 
and/or the N9 community, the future of the the community SSU, etc.

For that reason, I see both the referendum and pushing council candidates to 
state their proposals as useful.  I think just relying on the candidate 
manifestos could easily lead to deadlock -- imagine if you were elected and 
also someone who thought that instead of getting closer to Debian we should be 
getting closer to MeeGo: I think that a clear referendum result showing that 
the community wanted the Maemo.org community to continue to be active would 
help encourage the two of you to work together to try to achieve those goals 
even with some compromise.  Without it there is a danger that each of you say 
"I have a mandate for my proposal" and we just end up with deadlock.

[Jeremiah, I'm just using your proposals as an example, I am not suggesting 
that you would actually behave like that!]

Graham