[maemo-community] Harmattan & Maemo Community

[From: Ville M. Vainio]

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:

> Ville, I don't know what were you motivations stirring this discussion now
> but I still believe we can discuss a lot better when there is a device
> launch, or at least an official technical description of what is Harmattan.

My motivation comes from the realization that I have no idea how the
community dynamics around harmattan will work; and was willing to
check whether someone has a better idea. I do know what is not an
approved communication channel (meego.com).

My understanding is that all the relevant technical details about what
harmattan is are out there in public already, including differences to
meego. Things that are not known are technically insignificant things
like how the email application will look like. That is, stakeholders
in maemo community can already start thinking about whether they
should have some role around the platform. My earlier question is
still valid I think - what is the missing piece of information that is
needed to make this decision?

[ Not saying that this decision needs to be made now - but having more
time to think rarely leads to worse decisions ]

Things like technical support, qml questions etc. are easy, they have
their own mailing lists and forums. Telling people just to go to forum
nokia with their questions doesn't lead to a situation where people
help each other (i.e. community); they just post their question there,
wait for an answer and disappear.

My own opinion in case it was not obvious earlier: we should retain
all the maemo channels as centers of gravity for non-corporate
activities, even if Nokia will not be pushing harmattan through those
channels. What's the realistic alternative? Call it quits as far as
community goes? We could declare the community as being "assimilated
in the greater Qt community", but with maemo5/harmattan/meego there is
tons of stuff outside Qt, as is evident from thousands of discussions
not related to Qt at all.