[maemo-community] In case it's ultimately decided to accept this: late self-nomination

[From: Alexander Kozhevnikov]

For those who don't know, I'm Mentalist Traceur on the forums. My user
account on the remainder of the maemo.org site is mtraceur. After
considering the comments that have grown in the last day and a half or
so on the thread here ( http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=87061 )
it seems to me that it would be best (although I might regret
mentioning it again if it leads to even more quarreling) to throw my
self-nomination into here. I believe this is the correct location for
these things?

If it's not accepted due to the lateness, that's fine, I will still
contribute to the community as my time and ability permits. But it
seemed like there was some interest in having me run, so in the event
that the final decision is to accept me, this is here already. I am
also going to make a post in the thread aforementioned (in case the
mailing list guts out urls for some reason, I am referring to the
"Last Call for Council Nominations and Bylaws Review" thread), with
commentary more relevant to the discussion going on there, but some of
which (such as the "if you were sufficiently interested in running,
you wouldn't have missed the deadline" criticism) is relevant to
whether or not people view me as a worthy candidate. Anyway:

For starters, joerg_rw/DocScrutinizer, I sincerely appreciate you
dropping your nomination acceptance, to allow me to run - I am
uncertain as to what the ultimate interpretation of the rules will be
used to deal with this now (i.e. will the community ultimately decide
to insert me or anyone else into the running as a result or not), but
at the same time, I would like you to know that you didn't have to do
that. The community could benefit from you - quite possibly more than
from me.

Second, I want everyone to understand that I do not want to be added
into the running IF there's good reason to think that the only ways of
doing so would be to the detriment of the community. I.e. if doing so
forces the elections to grind to a standstill for a month, or even
delays it by more than a week at most, as I think someone has
suggested it would, there's almost no way anything I could bring to
either council or board would offset the time lost. I expressed an
interest in adding my name for the same reasons I hope and suppose
everyone else did - out of interest in benefiting the community. If me
offering up a late self-nomination is going to cause fracturing at
such a critical time, that would be contrary to the whole point of me
running anyway.

That said: I hereby self-nominate myself, for both Community Council
and the Board. I will be happy to serve the community in either
position, and I nominate myself for both because I think it is better
for the community to have the choice of putting me into either. (In
the event that this at all comes up, if my late nomination is accepted
for one but not the other, I have no qualms with that.)

I've been part of the community since June 2010, when I first got an
N900 - I browsed the talk.maemo.org forum for a couple months before
that, but wasn't active until after I got an N900 myself. I owe my
entire programming and Linux-savvy skillsets' development to this
community - if it weren't for an N900, I never would've gotten into
either of those things, and would have admired FOSS projects from
afar, agreeing with the ideals but never really getting involved. I'll
admit that my contributions have not been nearly as significant or
game changing as that of many community members. I merely took over
maintenance of the aircrack-ng and macchanger tools, after the
previous maintainer no longer had time, and got the aircrack-ng (and
its dependency iw) package down to extras, which it hadn't been
before. I also maintain an alpine port in the repository, but that's
not used much afaik. I wrote a command-line tool for reading/writing
r&d mode flags from on-device, unfortunately one that depends on
Nokia's proprietary libcal-dev package/library, but this was heavily
based on a GUI program that did the same thing made by qwerty12.
Beyond that I've at most a couple other tidbits of code-involving
contributions. The majority of my time in the community, has been
doing my best trying to help other users based on the knowledge that I
myself learned. Lately I've managed to do less of this than, say, the
year prior, but I try to do it when I have the chance.

The main reason I think I might be useful to the community as a whole,
is this: To this day, I look out at all of the other devices out
there, and I don't see something I could enjoy nearly as much. If this
community fails, if the user base and/or ability to maintain and
update these devices easily is fragmented into tiny little pieces of
obscure privately maintained back-up repositories and other forums, I
have a lot to lose. And I know that there are plenty of other users
for whom nothing else on the market than their current devices is
desirable, who feel the same way. I've said it before on the forums -
I have never had another technological device provide me with as much
happiness and quality-of-life increase as my N900 did. And I recognize
that the FOSS nature of both a good chunk of the software, and the
adherence to FOSS principles by many in the community itself, is what
allowed this family of devices to be this for many members. According
to the the proposed bylaws for Hildon Foundation, "The mission of the
Foundation is to promote and progress the future availability of maemo
derived or inspired open source software, and related toolkits, for
mobile devices. ... Further, the Foundation may promote and advocate
for the availability of mobile devices which have open source software
and/or open hardware architectures." - this is not just a goal I
approve of - it's a goal that is /extremely/ in-line with what I would
like to see happen in the world, the sooner the better. Whether
elected or not, I would do what I am able to help further this goal,
not only because this community, and the family of devices it
supports, are valuable to both me and the community, but also because
I would consider it my ethical duty to do so. Of course, that
motivation is there regardless of whether my self-nomination is
accepted or not, or if I'm elected to either position - but being in
said position(s) would, I suspect, allow me to do more towards those
ends.

Thank you for your time and consideration, to all who read this.

Sincerely,
Alexander Kozhevnikov