[maemo-developers] My first day as maemo.org distmaster

[From: Carsten Valdemar Munk]

Starting from today, I will be officially starting my work as  
maemo.org distmaster. Nokia has gracefully sponsored this position for  
the community at the request of the maemo.org community council.

The current maemo.org team cover areas such as bug management, system  
administration&collaboration spaces, documentation, forums and  
maintaining software repositories. All these positions facilitate  
development and collaboration in the community - one based around the  
Maemo platform and the Nokia devices. But one particular area is  
missing: the facilitation of tablet/device operating system development.

While maemo.org currently targets developers building on top of the  
OS, many people within the community is interested in improving the  
OS, since it is what they have to deal with daily - as Maemo users. In  
my time within maemo.org I've found there's been a reliance on Nokia  
to provide fixes for problems - instead of looking within the  
community for people who were capable enough to fix the problem,  
deliver the solution and publish it in a manner that non-developers  
can utilize the fix.

One of the maemo.org 2010 Agenda goals is to provide Maemo variants -  
which would be the pipeline for delivering community fixes.

Maintaining a Maemo variant is not a easy job - you have to deal with  
a lot of different stakeholders in a diplomatic manner, mentor and  
engage new developers, often do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself,  
faciliate the developing and invent new collaboration spaces for this.

Facilitating and engaging the community in this manner is a day job -  
which is why we have the maemo.org team.

I will have 20 hours per week (part-time until January of my own  
choice) where I will be doing mostly community work and some internal  
Nokia work as needed.

The primary role as a distmaster is defined as facilitating the  
development of Maemo variants (Mer, Diablo/Fremantle Community  
Variants, etc):

* Developing collaboration spaces for developers of Maemo variants
* Mentoring and engaging developers in order to move the Maemo  
platform and variants ahead
* Communicating with stakeholders (Nokia, distributions implementing  
the Maemo platform, users and developers)

Secondary role is serving as a paid system developer for the maemo.org  
community:

* Developing fixes and features for the Maemo OS & variants either on  
his/her own based on the input of maemo.org community council
* or through activating, mentoring for and collaborating with  
community developer(s) in order to get it completed in collaboration  
with upstream developers.

As I am also maintaining the ports and base system area for Mer, I  
will focus myself on the hardware support for Nokia devices and let  
other team members deal with other device communities/vendors to avoid  
any potential conflict of interest situations.

As primary facilitator for the Mer project I've successfully helped  
activate many developers within the community in order to get Mer to  
where it is today. A lot of these developers came to the Maemo project  
at the hope of being able to develop the OS but ended up contributing  
few pieces to move ahead - but there was noone to group all these  
things and incorporate them in the system, so the brilliant pieces  
ended up gathering dust - until now. Now there's a official community  
position to make this work happen.

Looking forward to working even more closely with this community.

Regards,
Carsten Valdemar Munk / Stskeeps