UK development community used in Nokia marketing video
A number of UK Maemo developers and maemo.org members have been featured in an official Nokia UK marketing video. The video shows them showing off their applications and favourite features. Imagine you had the time, the patience and the Mensa-munching brain power to design your perfect phone. Now imagine you got together with a bunch of other developers with the same dream. Click the "Developers Community" at the top-right of the link to see Gary Birkett, David Greaves, Aniello Del Sorbo, Dave Neary and others.
Brainstorm - how do we make it useful, and manage it?
In a wide-ranging thread, Rüdiger Schiller kicks off a discussion as to whether the maemo.org Brainstorm is performing well (general consensus is it isn't) and what process and technology changes could improve it: How do we handle threads without response for a longer period of time? Where is the right place to discuss app/enhancement requests? Where do we start bug attention catchers? At the bugtracker we have the option to link dependencies. Would it be useful to have this feature at Brainstorm and Talk:Brainstorm? Users raising enhancement requests in Bugzilla are getting frustrated with the current "take it to Brainstorm" approach; and experts are frustrated that "every solution" is equal with the most-popular, but least-implementable, often being voted highest. If nothing else, expectations need to be set more clearly.
Ask the Community Council
Randall Arnold, one of the five currently serving maemo.org Community Council members, has invited questions and comments from the community: welcome to the thread where you can ask your maemo.org council whatever you like. I don't know if my fellow representatives will participate (and don't begrudge them if they don't), so I might wind up being the only one answering. But if nothing else, maybe this will reduce the stress on my PM inbox. With less than two months left of the current council's term, this is an opportunity to talk to your elected councilmen who represent the community to Nokia (and vice-versa) and facilitate cross-community collaboration.
FOSDEM 2010 just around the corner
The largest gathering of open source developers and advocates in Europe, FOSDEM, has a relatively large Maemo presence this year. Held next weekend, it is a yearly free and non-commercial event in Brussels, from February 5th till February 7th 2010. It's organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide free and open source developers a place to meet. [...] There will be Maemo content in several different tracks this year, reflecting the nature of the project as both a contributor to upstream projects and an entire distribution. Over 20 members of the Maemo community have put their name down on the wiki page so far.
London Maemo meet-up
Members of talk.maemo.org are trying to organise a London/south-east England meet-up to get together and share their experiences in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. Greg Roberts writes, I'm very interested to see how others use the device, and what people have done to customise etc, also interested in seeing apps i've not got round to testing/looking at yet. The suggested day is still up-in-the air, but doesn't look like it'll be be far off.
Dist- and deb-master timesheets online
In an exciting show of transparency, Carsten Munk - the latest addition to the paid maemo.org team - has published his timesheets to date: This is because there's only so much status updates and blog posts can say, but this is the material I'm actually invoicing for and I have to be able to stand in for this professionally. Since I'm interested in community transparency, well, here they are. Jeremiah Foster, our packaging guru, followed suit.
Sheep: a community built game
This may well be better placed in "Applications", and as it progresses out of Extras-devel it may well. However, Sheep, a game concept dreamt up by Kathy Smith and Gary Birkett has been built by a team of enthusiasts on talk.maemo.org. A simple accelerometer game, written in Qt, the aim is to steer the sheep into their pens. Kathy says, it really is an exemplar of the community at work collaboratively. About three artists, a dev, a sheep-impressionist, a bunch of ideas, encouragers and a demented teddy bear make a powerful team! The growth of the community may have made knowing everything that's going on more difficult (hence MWKN), but it also means we've got a much greater pool of talent to draw upon if your idea is engaging enough.