Third Council Comes to Order

Hot on the heels of the second maemo.org community council and their excellent work, the incoming third council representatives are ready to roll up their sleeves. Some vital needs identified by the growing community are wiki cleanup and expansion, increased Brainstorm activity and quickly routing newcomers to proper resources. Action plans have already been started, champions identified and progress made!

Let's do some introductions:

Alan Bruce ("qole")
- Member of forums since Oct 2007 (shortly before my first N800 arrived)
- Moderator of Alternatives section in forums
- Primary maintainer of the "Easy Debian" project
- Second term on the council
- Helped with Nokia World N900 announcement: published hands-on article on maemo.org

Goals for next 6 months

- Improve task documentation in sprint process
- Encourage Community Diablo SSU
- Act as peacemaker in forums as new N900 users arrive
- Encourage integration of maemo.org community (mailing lists, forums, IRC)
- (personal goal: Fremantle version of Easy Debian in Extras free, plus git tree in garage)

Graham Cobb (gcobb)
- Active hobbyist developer
- According to maemo.org I have been a member since 1970-01-01 but I think I have really been involved since some time in 2006
- Active on the mailing lists, try to be helpful on Talk
- Maintainer for Maemo port of GPE applications as well as Xsisusb, Opensync, tinc and contributor to MUD

Goals for next 6 months

- Welcome lots of new developers attracted by N900 and make sure they get the support they need to develop lots of exciting applications
- Understand how the community will evolve as new types of developers arrive (power users, hobbyist, professional, commercial) and new types of software are made available (open source, not-open-but-free as-in-beer, not-free-at-all)
- Support users of existing/old tablets and encourage developers to support them
- Invite debate on how we can attract young developers (students)
- Review 1st year of council: what has worked well, what can be improved.
This includes website, sprints, SDK Alpha and Beta programs, Nokia's Stars program, device availability, responsiveness to community feedback and bugs, autobuilder, extras-testing, etc.

Matthew Lewis ("penguinbait")
- Member of forums since Jan 2006 (shortly after my Nokia 770 purchase)
- Maemo hacker for fun
- I have worked on several personal projects over the years, KDE 3.5.8, several tools to clone system partitions, and various other exploits.
- I am not a developer. I have been using Linux for about 13 years. I am a unix admin by trade.
- First term on the council

Goals for next 6 months:

- Encourage integration of maemo.org community (mailing lists, forums, IRC)
- Communication Channels - Understanding where to go for what, removing redundancy
- New Users experience - Work towards better ways to become more maemo.org aware
- Increase community involvement/participation in decisions ie: brainstorm, community forum
- Increase voter participation in next community election

Randall Arnold ("Texrat")
- Member of forums since June 2006
- Moderator of Brainstorm subforum
- Key member of Nokia N800 launch team (product Quality Assurance)
- Blogger at http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com

- Improve maemo.org wiki articles
- Work to ensure that Brainstorm is a productive, viable process
- facilitate increased/enhanced interaction with Nokia
- Transform casual users into testers and bug reporters
- (personal goal: joke less, help more)

Valério Valério (VDVsx) - Chair
- MSc researcher
- Open Source advocate
- Active in the community since September 2008
- Responsible for the Maemo @ GSoC initiate
- Maemo Summit organization - Content Committee
- Developer of BlueMaemo

Goals for next 6 months:

- Help new developers and users
- Bridge between developers, designers and users
- Initiatives to bring more members to the community
- Encourage the participation in the sprint meetings and tasks
- Encourage brainstorming around the maemo.org infrastructure, and about what can be improved.

Video: Maemo Community Council Introduction at the Maemo Summit (Thanks crashanddie)

Keep in mind as with previous councils that we are your representatives, dedicated to making sure your voices are heard and heloping facilitate engagement with Nokia. Feel free to contact any of your council members for any reason!