Never one to hold a grudge, I’d like to congratulate the FFmpeg developers on their recent release of FFmpeg 0.5.
I’ve been pretty hard on FFmpeg in the past for their lack of releases and their API policy - it’s made packaging their software hard for distributions, and developing using their libraries hard for third party developers. A release is great news, and I hope it is the first of many.
The voting is now closed in the Maemo Community Council referenda on election procedures for the upcoming and future Maemo Community Council elections.
The provisional results, which will stand unless successfully challenged within the next 7 days, are as follows:
139 votes were cast of an electorate of 601 (23%)
We will maintain a 25 karma requirement for the next elections.
129 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21.5%).
For future elections, voters must have a karma of 10, and have created their maemo.org account more than 3 months before the closing date of the election.
127 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21%).
Future elections, including the election to be held in a few weeks, will be by preferential vote, and will be counted using the Single Transferrable Vote system.
I will be modifying the Maemo election system (stolen borrowed from the GNOME Foundation) before the next elections to implement preferential voting, and we will likely be using OpenSTV to count ballots after the next election.
Jono asked on the AOC blog for successful governance stories, and while I’m happy to comment on the blog, now that I’ve taken the time to write some down, I thought I might as well share them 
Voting is open for the 3 referenda around the election procedure for Maemo community council elections.
A wiki page has been created for each referendum, where arguments for & against each of the options can be listed. For the moment, these pages are skeletons, but feel free to debate in the Talk page, and perhaps add some arguments for & against in the main page (but they will be heavily moderated to avoid flame-wars).
A reminder of the 3 referenda:
Voting is open now, until midnight UTC next Monday, the 23rd of February. As we used to say in Ireland in the ’80s, vote early, vote often!
I just bought a round trip for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, flying out on July 3rd and returning on July 11th, with Europa Air, from Lyon to Las Palmas via Madrid, for €254 including taxes. I found the ticket on Expedia.
This is, quite frankly, very cheap - and I expect that ticket prices will only start going up from here on in.
To all those planning on attending: please buy your tickets now.
If you need some travel assistance, buy the tickets now, and keep a receipt, and ask for assistance afterwards. The longer you wait, the more expensive your ticket will cost, and the less likely it will be that we will be able to partially or fully reimburse you.
It might be worth your while checking ticket prices via a travel agency - since this is a holiday destination, the travel agency may have access to charter flights which aren’t listed on sites like lastminute or expedia. Also, have a look at Easyjet, a budget airline that can give you really cheap flights and isn’t listed in the online reservation sites.
Reggie Supildo announced today something that we’ve been talking about for a while now - ITt will be coming under the maemo.org umbrella. Internet Tablet Talk, for those who don’t know, is a community-run forum where members have always been unfettered in their praise and criticism of Maemo, and of Nokia’s running of the project. And they will continue to be unfettered - as part of maemo.org.
This is very exciting - the ITt forums have always been a kind of world apart, and to be honest it’s been hard to follow what’s been going on there. There are hundreds of contributors, and dozens of new posts every day, on all matters related to Maemo and Nokia’s internet tablets.
We’ve been getting progressively closer for the past few months - ITt news items are syndicated in the Maemo news feed, and we have a recently added Karma plug-in for ITt posts. This is a logical next step. Of course, ITt will continue to be run by Reggie and Roger, and aside from retheming the site to match maemo.org, users will hopefully notice little in the operation of the site. But my hope is that ITt users will feel a little more like part of the Maemo community, once the forum is on maemo.org. This is one more piece in Maemo’s journey from a Nokia-run project to a Nokia-sponsored, community-run project.
It’s been a quiet day in GNOMEland here in Lyon. Not too many people around the JDLLs this year - hopefully things will be more lively tomorrow, and some lessons will be learned for the organisation for next year.
I finally got some A1 & A2 posters printed up that look very nice, if I may say so myself - special credit to artists & contributors andreasn, mizmo & zagorskid for the material.
Fredp, looking zen, at JDLL 08 in Lyon
Along with some “Why choose GNOME?” hand-outs, a Nokia N810, Nokia N800, a couple of laptops, and fredix, Dodji fredp and myself, the stand is looking not too shabby - could be better, could be worse. Tomorrow Dodji will be gone, but vuntz will be here.
To follow on from various discussions and the unfortunately short BOF we had on this subject in Berlin, Ryan Abel (who couldn’t make it to the summit) suggested holding an informal IRC meeting to talk about the next steps in the maemo.org revamp.
The IRC meeting will be at 19:00 UTC on Saturday the 27th of September, on the #maemo-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.
After the Summit, I believe that the basic elements of the changes we want to make are now well understood. Our dual goal is to reorganise existing information to provide the most relevant information to people who are coming to the site from outside the community, while catering to the different needs of people who are long-time members of the community. We’re going to do this by reorganising existing content where possible, rather than attempt to completely redesign the site.
Coming to the end of the first day of the Maemo Summit in C-Base in Berlin. From just outside, you have a view of the antenna of the space station that the C-Base group have been mapping out for the past few years. For those who don’t know, this is the terraforming space station which brought life to earth, and which crashed in what is now Berlin 4.5 billion years ago. Only the central tower, now in use as a television tower, is visible above ground.
Last night, “the Roaming Gnomes”, a team I put together, participated in the ACCESS pub quiz at OSiM World, organised by Lefty Schlesinger.
Lefty ran a Jeopardy-type quiz which was raucous, fun, energetic, competitive, and replete with a Windows Vista crash and a Flock bug. A bunch of teams had a go at questions in categories that included “Open source personalities”, “Comics and Movies”, “Mobile industry history”, “History of computing” and some general knowledge categories. And in the end, the best team won.Us! (Update: Now includes a photo of the winning team - Bdale and Jim got shy, and Niels had to leave early, and I think it’s Heikki who also missed the photo).
The Roaming GNOMEs
So here’s the role call of the Roaming Gnomes heros who helped bring the huge trophy to GNOME.
Congratulations to Lefty on running a very successful quiz - it was a good range of questions, and the rules change mid-game definitely contributed to the animation of the competition. And thanks once more to all the members of the team.
On Thursday I’ll be participating in a panel at OSIM World - “Effectively Building and Maintaining an Open Source Community”. It was a happy coincidence when I saw Matt Asay writing about the issue on Friday, and again today - it gives me a chance to think a bit more about the issues involved, and provides a data point which is very close to the experience that I have repeatedly seen when companies decide to use free software, be it peripherally or strategically.
