[maemo-developers] Are we, as community, ready [for linuxtag]?

[From: Quim Gil]

ext Kees Jongenburger wrote:
> Hi
> 
> After reading Quim's, mail about linuxtag again, I get stuked at point 4
> 
>> 4. MAEMO.ORG: WHAT NEXT?
>> Mid term: What Nokia should do + What the community should do
> 
> I think that "What should the community do" indeed is a very valid question.

Funny that after reading it in my email then I edited in the wiki page:

> Mid term: What Nokia should do + What the community could do

Note the change to "could".  :)  In fact what I wanted to say is "What
the community could and is willing to do".


> What should we do as community?
> What can we do as community around linuxtag?

Thanks for expanding these questions. I see LinuxTag just as a formal
checkpoint. Nokia is willing to support more community gatherings and in
general further deeper levels of community activities. But of course
this only makes sense if you want this.

One option for Nokia would be just to announce a Great Plan with a Good
Budget, present it and execute it. Others do this and some of them in
fact do it pretty well. But if you ask me I would prefer to have the
maemo community organically involved already in the definition of the
Great Plan.

Nokia chose to have this public and progressive path of implementation
of a new concept from the 770 onwards for a reason. The path is painful
sometimes and some things are not always as final & ready as we would
like... but the organic growth and the learning process is priceless,
for Nokia and I believe for the maemo community as well.

maemo and maemo.org are an essential part of this progression, but there
is a radical difference for you: the community can take ownership of
maemo.org, having Nokia Inc. as a trustful and solid member - but no
more than that.

Involving the community in hardware design or commercial software
products is hard - especially hard for open source community standards.
But an increasing amount of maemo activity is not originated inside
Nokia and there is no reason why the community couldn't manage that
formally.

This is the kind of discussion we would like to have within the maemo
community. This mailing list and a maemo track in LinuxTag should help.
More suggestions are welcome.


> Wouldn't it be great to have something to present as community?
> -Do you feel any pressure to make maemo a success?
> -What would be a good community activity?
> 
> The Audience of linuxtag is "developers, business people, users"
> can we offer ourself or others something?
> 
> I would be very interested in answers to those questions.
> mostly are we ready for linuxtag?
> 
> My self I wonder most why I did not implement more hardware hacks
> (webcam/gps/hid/usb_host/joy_stick/inter_maemo communication).
> 
> What I loved in the last year(as you will see not very much pure
> community stuff sorry):
> -New hardware (I was specialy exited about the gps)
> -Canola
> -Mamona
> -Modest email client getting updated very often , seeing progress
> -The sdk updates and new applications to switch to usb_networking(why
> did we not do that ages ago?)

I'm definitely biased but there were things like the revamped maemo news
and the Downloads sections, giving a lot more visibility and direct
input to the community.


> Last but not least, this is the general feeling I currently have.
> Maemo feels like a very nice bus. I like the view, enjoy the ride
> but I am not the driver and not the mechanics man. Our role as
> community is to make sure there are enough steering wheels and we have
> our own bus drivers and bus factories. Maemo does have success in
> attracting "creative developers" (many nice python based apps) is this
> the way to go?

Metaphors are so powerful. But you need to pick them carefully and
explore them further. For instance, following your bus:

- What if Nokia would be the driver in the official commercial hours but
then the maemo community would be able to ride it at will during the
rest of the time? There are many reasons why it's worth covering the
extra oil and maintenance if in exchange of that more people can do more
stuff instead of having the bus parked overnight and on weekends.

- What about stressing that a huge percentage of the mechanics are not
controlled by Nokia either, but by a wide range of open source suppliers
you can interact with - openly and without messing with the Nokia agenda
at all?


> 
> greetings
> 
> p.s. perhaps somebody can talk about n810 as "hackable" platform?
> http://etrunko.blogspot.com/2008/04/android-running-on-n810.html

An undeniable beauty of maemo in the tablets is that you can get rid of
it completely  ;)  However, I think it's useful to have all this
discussion centered in maemo and not in the tablets.

Quim


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