This week we held a maemo.org sprint meeting to review the past 6 months of progress, discuss ways we can improve moving forward, and figure out how the next 6 months are going to look (logs and minutes thanks to Niels and Dave, respectively). The sprint process has been undergoing revision and refocus over the past couple of months, and this new meeting format was one of the results of those refocusing efforts. The hope is to utilize meeting times more effectively by avoiding the checklist syndrome that had been steadily creeping into the monthly sprint meetings.

In 2008, after maemo.org started transitioning to community control, we had a 100 Days brainstorm to help shape the direction of maemo.org. The results of the 100 Days were very positive, and as we're going through a similar sort of shakeup here with MeeGo (if less immediately positive), we'd like to repeated the brainstorming process for the next 6 months.

To that end, everyone in the Maemo community is invited to participate in a brainstorm over the future of maemo.org and threads have been created at talk.maemo.org for each of the main areas of the website and community:

• Downloads,
• Talk and mailing lists,
• Wiki,
• News and planet,
• Bugzilla,
• Packages,
• Garage and developer services,
• and, finally, how the community should work: Community workings.

The aim of the brainstorm is to come up with a list of tasks which can be worked on the maemo.org team, and the wider community, over the next six months to help ensure maemo.org is in a fit state to provide support for the Maemo Community for as long as possible and that we're ready for the MeeGo transition however it ends up happening.

The planned sprint meta-meeting will be held on #maemo-meeting on irc.freenode.net at 13:00 UTC on Monday, 17th May 2010.

The agenda is:

1. Review of progress over the past year of maemo.org team (open discussion)
2. Setting priorities for next 3 months for the community - not micro-tasks, but larger goals
3. Allocation of ownership & co-ordination responsibilities within these tasks to members of the maemo.org team
4. A full & frank discussion of the impact of the MeeGo project on the short-term goals of Maemo

All are invited. The following maemo.org contributors have already confirmed their availability:

• Andrew Flegg (Jaffa) - Maemo Community Council chair
• Carsten Munk (Stskeeps) - maemo.org distmaster
• Andre Klapper (andre) - maemo.org bugmaster
• Dave Neary (dneary) - maemo.org docmaster
• Niels Breet (X-Fade) - maemo.org webmaster and maemo.org team leader
• Ryan Abel (GeneralAntilles) - Maemo Community Council member
• Ferenc Szekely (feri) - maemo.org paid contributor
• Tero Kojo (tekojo) - Nokia technical manager
• Daniel Wilms (danielwilms) - maemo.org Nokia contributor

If you have any questions ahead of time, please don't hesitate to ask.

maemo.org currently organises its paid contributors; and some volunteers; through an agile "sprint" process. This process has tasks picked up and run with for four weeks.

Dave Neary has kicked off a discussion, on the maemo-community mailing list and talk.maemo.org about the dissatisfication felt by many people operating in that process recently:

The monthly check-list meetings have not been satisfying for me. Nor has not having a meeting at all. Over the past 3 months, it's felt like large sections of the Maemo community have moved into wait-and-see mode with MeeGo, and no-one wants to be working on things now which end up being obsoleted by MeeGo/Harmattan work in a few months.

If you'd like to shape the future of the collaboration between the amateur and professional aspects of the community; and how the MeeGo transition may affect that collaboration, please get involved.

Many developers feel they are suffering from the quality assurance process being used on maemo.org to ensure that high quality applications get into the Extras repository (which is enabled by default on all Maemo 5 devices).

Currently, a package must wait 10 days and get 10 votes before being promotable. This isn't too onerous for popular applications, with lots of testers, but for less popular - or niche - applications, it can become an almost insurmountable problem.

The Testing Squad is a group who commit to try and test as much as possible - and this has helped. However, there is now a new feature we can use on the testing queue.

A package which has been in the QA queue for 20 days without the requisite votes can be "swayed" by 3 votes from super testers. Testers will be shown as (tester), just like maintainers are visible now. So this process will be transparent to the maintainer too.

We now need volunteers!

If you'd like to be a super tester - and be involved as a final gatekeeper to Extras, please get in touch. Either email the council or reply to this post.

We're currently looking for about ten spots, the council - and the Testing Squad - will review the volunteers based on a number of factors, and we'll make a decision as a group.

As some know, we removed some emulators from maemo.org due to a legal dispute between Nokia and Nintendo. The dispute was not related to the emulators itself, but since the maemo.org infrastructure *is* paid for by Nokia, we decide to remove the emulators to avoid further problems.

This decision was made by Nokia together with the council and the developers involved, but we fail to communicate the decision in the first place to the community, was a very messy situation in a very grey area, and we were all a bit afraid to create more buzz. On behalf of the council I sincerely apologize for this lack of communication.

After some evaluation and discussion we decide to put the emulators back at maemo.org since there's no copyright infringement in the emulators code.

Maemo is intended to be an open platform, and we not intend to do any censorship in the applications available as long they meet the required Q&A, but the maemo.org infrastructure is sponsored by Nokia, we can't risk losing it.

On Behalf of the Maemo Community Council,

Valério Valério

Maemo Community Council Chair

Our community is getting bigger each day, we have a lot of new members at talk.maemo.org, but our IRC channel are also getting a lot of new users. I remember the times when we had less than 200 members at #maemo, nowadays in some periods of the day we usually have around ~500 users there.

Lot of people, lot of confusion - Is good to have a lot of people in the channel, asking questions and providing support for the new users, but sometimes is very difficult to keep a sane discussion there due to the parallel conversations, so some members of the community have decided to create some new IRC channels for some specific areas.

I'm glad to present you the new channels that are joining the Maemo family:

• #maemo-bugs - Created by our bugmaster - General discussion and bug triage. Some bug parties will happen there.
• #maemo-devel - Created by some very active members of our community - General discussion about development on the Maemo platform.
• #maemo-ui - Created by the Maemo5UI team - Maemo 5 UX Design discussion/consultancy/advices.

A special word for the Maemo5UI team, they did a very good work at Barcelona in the last weekend, they're very friendly and talented people, I'm very happy to see they willing to continue helping our community.

More information about the community IRC channels can be found here.

Just as a reminder or for those not subscribing the mailing lists, tomorrow (Nov 10) will be held a discussion about the community Q&A for Extras-testing.

We appreciate input from everyone, if you can't attend the meeting please express your thoughts in advance in the related thread[1].

Meeting details:

*IRC: irc.freenode.org
*Channel: #maemo-meeting
*Time: Tuesday, November 10th, 14:30 UTC

More details and discussion:

[1] - http://n2.nabble.com/Quality-Assurance-and-Extras-testing-discussion-on-IRC-td3945607.html#a3945607

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!

I must say that the last year has been quite a blast. Not only has being a Maemo Community Council member been fun, but it's been a great learning experience too: it has really exposed my to the inner workings of community management (the good, the bad, and the ugly), even after having been a part of so many open source projects in the past. I am proud of my year-long tennure, though -- as well as the jobs that were performed by the other Council members -- and I feel like we're leaving some rather large shoes to fill. (Still, I am definitely resting assured in the fact that the new lineup will all do an amazing job of shoe-filling.)

As stated here (and a few other places), voting for the third Maemo Community Council begins tomorrow, Monday, 21 September 2009, and will run through Sunday, 27th September 2009 23:59 UTC. Voting instructions should be sent out to all people who are eligible to vote soon.

If you'd like to see the final list of candidates, go here:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Council/Candidate_declarations_for_September_2009

We've got a great line-up of very active community members this time. It's a very exciting time for Maemo and the five people who you choose will help guide our community for the next six months. Don't make your decisions frivolously.

Good luck to all of the candidates!