Community Council/Council election Q3 2010/Candidate declarations

Candidates for Q3 2010 Maemo Community Council elections
The following candidates have been nominated for the Maemo Community Council. The third column contains the status of the nomination (accepted, rejected, waiting) - this is relevant for candidates who did not nominate themselves.

Candidate declarations
Where applicable:

Andrea Grandi
My name is Andrea Grandi, from Italy. Most of you probably already know me, but I'll introduce myself for people who joined later.

I'm a computer science student at Università degli Studi di Firenze and I've worked in the past as software developer for some companies. I also lead the Linux user group of my city (PtLUG), and for this reason my programming interests are directed to opensource development.

Working for PtLUG I've also gained a lot of experience about how to relate to a community and how to organize events.

Past and present in Maemo Community
I joined the Maemo Community since the first Maemo device was out (Nokia 770) and I've been always so excited for being able to contribute to this project.

In the past I've attended at both Maemo Summit doing a short talk. During last summer I collaborated with PyMaemo team during a stage at Igalia and at the moment I'm developing a couple of applications using Python and Qt.

Areas where I could help in the council
In the Maemo Council I could help mainly for two things. First of all I could help for the organization of the events. Finding a strategic place to organize an event and selecting interesting contents to attract more people is not an easy task. I think that there are still some areas where we can work better to give to the Community a better Summit.

Being a developer too I think I could help improving tools that Maemo developers use. For example a lot of work could be done to improve the Maemo Garage (did you notice that main Maemo project have their code in Gitorius, mailing list on Maemo Garage, website on another hosting service etc...... ?!).

What I would like to do in the Council

 * Maemo(MeeGo) Summit organization: as I already said, there are some areas that we could improve and I'm going to work in this direction.
 * Promoting developers contests: a nice way to attract developers is challenging them. We could organize a contest and I'm sure that a lot of interesting applications could be created by community.
 * Improving the "getting started" part of all areas: I've noticed that for a new developers or users has never been easy to find where to start from. I think that a lot could be done to improve this.

Of course I've also other ideas for the Community, but first of all let's see how this Maemo+Moblin fusion will evolve. We are no more just "Maemo" now, we are a larger community so I think it's better to start as soon as possible working together to create the best community ever :)

Tim Samoff
It's funny to think that I've been laying low in such a way that many people within the Maemo Community might not know me. For my absence, I apologize -- although, my absence has not been without just cause. In any case, I feel like my life is coming back into a place where I might be able to lend a hand -- and a voice -- in much more of a deliberate capacity.

That being said, I would like to nominate myself (again) for this esteemed position within our amazing community of software rebels... Even so, this is not to say that I wouldn't like some of the newer blood to demolish me in the elections. But, for that to happen, we need the newer blood to nominate themselves -- or nominate others -- and make this an important election... Not just one that was left by the wayside.

These are important times for our community. Not only are we on the verge of another community conference, but the community dynamic and infrastructure is about to take a dramatic shift. With the advent of Meego, we, as a community, must forge a path in which the community (members new and old) have a say in the future of our development framework and operating system. Enough said.

I am not going to make my nomination a history of what I have contributed to the community. There are plenty of forum threads, blog posts, etc. to prove my worth. But, this is the forum, I think, to stress the importance of having a Community Council and of remaining diligent in expressing out beliefs, our ideals, and our desires to Nokia and Intel.

We are the voice. That's what Maemo was built upon. Don't let laziness, shyness, or some sort of self-imposed form of self-motivation get in your way.

This is my self-nomination. But, I'm an old hand. Nominate yourself and become a pivotal force in Maemo and Meego.

Rüdiger Schiller
I am in if and only if the empty spaces get filled by at least 2 former or active council members.

Consider this as a nominee.

Cosimo Kroll
Many of you know me already from a summit or another event.

Currently I have my own site http://meetmeego.org and I am organizing our very successful event, the mobile freidae (more information at http://mobilefreidae.org). Both are focused on Germany, or the German speaking part of the world.

As you may know, I'm also focused on helping newbies for example via instant messengers. I'm always thinking that I was a newbie, too. This will be even more important with the move/merge to/with MeeGo as the devices will be more mainstream than ever.

Andrew Flegg
As with Tim, I'm an old hand and the current chair of the council. The last 6 months have been interesting and challenging for the community, coming as they did after the announcement of the merger of Moblin and Maemo teams at Intel and Nokia and to form MeeGo.

The thing I've learned is that Nokia's planning didn't seem to extend to the community and Intel (not having much of a Moblin community) didn't think much of it either. This has resulted in fear, uncertainty and doubt. The new MeeGo community is also making wholly new mistakes, for which we need to bring our extensive experience of maemo.org and the Maemo Community to bear; for example, the ability of community packages to depend on each other. It's also entirely unclear whether meego.com should be the home for MeeGo device discussions, let alone Harmattan or MeeGo-Harmattan HE on N900.

The MeeGo community is forming, however the Maemo community feels like it's stagnating. There are a few reasons for this, however the big one is that of fear & uncertainty, as I mentioned above. We all want a continual updates to our device's OS, a steady stream of enhancements and a vibrant ecosystem. What's unclear is the best way of achieving that:


 * Core MeeGo Handset port to N900
 * MeeGo-Harmattan port to N900
 * Maemo 5 Community SSU

Certainly in the short term, the last one is the easiest to achieve and can even provide benefits whilst waiting for (hopefully) PR1.3. That's what I support MohammadAG's efforts in this area; and hope we can get some real traction there. Hopefully the other two will contribute to each other and they will become realistic day-to-day alternatives to Maemo 5. But they're not there yet.

The budget for maemo.org is being reduced and the number of hours contracted for the paid staff is decreasing. Nokia are also less interested in Maemo and its community. Therefore, if elected, I plan to:


 * Clarify the position of the paid team and what we can expect from them (a task which is currently underway[1])
 * Hold a referendum in this term, no later than February 2011 on the topic of whether the Community Council needs to continue for a future term, and have discussions about the governance of maemo.org.

Hopefully, by January a new device will be out and we will be able to see the effect of consumer-quality MeeGo devices on the Maemo community; and it'll be clearer how the MeeGo community is operating.

Since making the decision to run again (I was in the founding council, chaired the following council and am chair again now) we've had a set of new candidates come forward; so I revisited this decision. I think, however, some form of continuity would be useful at this critical time.

If you have any questions for me, please don't hesitate to ask. I also encourage people to come up with questions for the other candidates.