With the Maemo community council elections over, I’d like to congratulate the newly elected council. Good luck to Eduardo Lima, Andrew Flegg, Ryan Abel, Simon Pickering and Tim Samoff, who will make up the inaugural community council.
The council serves for a six month term, so they have a big job in front of them to define its role, and ensure it’s relevant to the Maemo community for years to come.
The Maemo community council election has been running for 5 days now, and voting closes at midnight Wednesday - I’ll be announcing the new council (subject to any contestations, protests, etc) on Thursday the 11th, one week before the Maemo community gets to meet in person in Berlin for the Maemo Summit.
If you think you should have a ballot, and you haven’t received one last Wednesday, please drop me a line.
If you have received a ballot and haven’t voted yet, please do so - there is only a little more than 2 days left to the election closing.
While I’m talking about the election, I’d like to thank GNOME for the election software we stole^Wborrowed and got working^W^Ware using for the election. I hope that the instructions which I wrote for the module are useful, and end up getting included in the foundation-web module.
Thanks also to Henri Bergius from Nemein, who got the software installed and has been my hands and eyes for the past few days on a server to which I don’t have access.
A couple of major things are happening around Maemo just before my holidays (oooh, scary) - first is that we recently rolled out some improvements to Maemo profiles - there are many new fields, including IM and IRC usernames, and the possibility to enter multiple email addresses for karma, and in general we prettied things up.
One new field is the company that people work for - and this is particularly useful in the newly spruced up profile ranking page - previously this page listed only usernames and karma, it now includes company and real name, allowing you to see at a glance where contributions are coming from. Of course, for this to be really useful, now that the fields are there, we need more people to fill them in 
The second big thing is the inaugural Maemo community council election. The entire Maemo community will be electing 5 people from among the most active community participants to represent the community’s interests to Nokia, and to co-ordinate community initiatives.
Nominations are open now - anyone with over 100 karma points can nominate themselves by sending a mail with their name, company affiliation and motivations for running to maemo-community@maemo.org before 23:59 UTC on the 2nd of September. The full list of eligible candidates is in the wiki.
As part of the judging panel for the maemo.org logo contest (along with Peter Schneider, Tim Samoff and David Greaves) I had the daunting task of choosing the winner from the long list of entries to the maemo.org contest. There were 62 people who submitted logos for consideration, and a total of around 120 logos to choose from (excluding variants of the same logo), we had our work cut out for us.
In the end, we went for this logo from glaolivier:
The judges (that includes me!) liked the modernity of it, the clean typeface, the call-out to the current maemo.org colours, and the mixed metaphor of the a and e joined - infinity, a meeting of minds, and openness. And it was pretty. There are a bunch of single-colour and flat variants for things like monochrome print, t-shirts and so on.
We’re very happy with it, and we believe that everyone else will be too.
OSCON has been pretty cool this year so far. It’s been really weird, since I haven’t been in North America too often in the past, and this is my first ORA conference, to be meeting people I’ve exchanged email with for years in the corridors, and bumping into people that I’ve been hearing about for ages. There’s also a decent scattering of people I already knew, too. Far too many to name individually without leaving people out & insulting somebody…
I arrived on Friday, and to help get over jet-lag, I decided to go out for an hour-long run. After losing all sense of orientation, and going North when I thought I was going East, that ended up being a 2 hour run. Which was nice.
Over the weekend, the FLOSS Foundations group met, and we talked about lots of stuff - accounting, membership, CRM & donor management software that non-profits can use (there isn’t any that works well enough), merging foundations, and how umbrella foundations work (targeted funding, etc), best practices for dealing with donors (big and small), merchandising, CLAs, trademark policies, and a really interesting discussion on university outreach, the creation, aggregation & distribution of open course materials and university outreach.
All in all, a very valuable 2 days.
On Monday, I attended OMX, the first edition of the Open Mobile Exchange. Myself & Paul Cooper stepped in at the last minute to give a tag-team presentation on GNOME Mobile which went, to my mind, very well. Having 2 people was great, because it meant that all of the things we wanted to say got said (usually I end up being quite non-linear and saying “oh, earlier, I forgot to mention…”, with Paul that didn’t happen). There was a decent amount of GNOME Mobile presence in any case - Jim Zemlin had nice things to say about us, and Jenny Minor from Vernier and Lefty Schlessinger from Access gave presentations from the perspective of a device manufacturer and a platform developer.
Tuesday was a quiet day for me - finally got to have quality phone time with Anne, and attended the Maemo sprint meeting on IRC before eating with Stormy - we talked about a couple of cool things I’ve been working on for the past two days that I hope to be able to announce in the next few days.
All in all, a great conference, social & work merged, mixed, mashed, and with a spot of early-morning running & Tour de Francing.Happy happy joy joy.
Tonight: RedMonk beer tastes Good.
That is the question…
I am honoured to have become the latest GNOME personality to catch the eye of Sam Varghese.
Sam feels I was unfair in my characterisation of him as a “shock jock”. He may be right… he says himself that the definition of a shock jock is “a slang term used to describe a type of radio broadcaster (sometimes a disc jockey) who attracts attention using humor (sic) that a significant portion of the listening audience may find offensive.” Clearly, since Sam’s not funny, I was unfair. Sorry Sam.
I take issue with Sam’s massive leap (which reminds me of when my maths professors used to say “obviously it follows…” at the end of complicated theorems) when he says that I “have to fight the perception that any of [our] major sponsors is making nice noises to the other camp”.
First, as I have told Sam on numerous occasions when he contacts us for answers to leading questions, we do not think of KDE as “the other camp”. Second, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t exactly avoid a perception that he’s a fan of KDE. Later in the same article, he says that he thinks that KDE have got a nice rate of development going, and are driving innovation better than GNOME. He’s the first top-paying member of KDE eV, which is roughly the same amount of money annually as Canonical gives to GNOME.
And Mark’s not alone. Nokia are sponsors of both Akademy and GUADEC, as well as investing heavily in both GNOME (through Maemo) and QT (and paying the wages of some KDE developers).
What Sam has trouble understanding is that I have an issue with sloppy journalism. I like the KDE developers, we get on well, and I’ve done a lot of work bridging gaps between projects - whether it be through the organisation of Libre Graphics Meeting or FOSTEL, or my participation in the FLOSS Foundations group, or the numerous conversations I have with KDE board members about any number of subjects (including Akademy & GUADEC colocating).
So when Sam sets me up as a shill, or as someone who has a problem with KDE (or considers them competitors) he’s ignoring a body of evidence that suggests otherwise. But then, with Sam, that’s par for the course.
It’s been a hectic week, but I really wanted to write up some notes from this year’s GUADEC for posterity, and to share some of the great stuff that happened that people might not know about.
I hate to give attention to Sam Varghese, but he is, after all, my favourite free software Shock Jock - always looking for conflict, or the controversial angle on the most innocuous statement.
The maemo.org logo competition is going strong, and we now have many dozens of logo contest submissions.
Some of my favourites so far:
The very first one, Attila’s butterfly
Jussi’s first effort - particularly with just the A and the E:
And Jussi’s second entry, with the Möbius strip. You can see the evolution of this idea, and his collaboration with Thiercito, on the latter’s talk page, which provided some insights into the creative process for me. It’d have been nice if he had trimmed some excess whitespace off the images, mind:
Think you can do better than these or other entries? There’s still lots of time left to get your entries in before the deadline! We’ll be announcing the selection process over the next week or two once the last details are sorted out.
With the recent discussion in blogs around the GNOME world, it can be easy to forget that there have been some great new applications for GNOME appearing recently. Many of these are written by a new breed of GNOME developer, young students with none of the weight of history sitting on their shoulders, and they are great!
If you haven’t tried them yet, then you should. Most of these aren’t in the GNOME desktop suite, and could probably do with some more exposure.
Here’s a few that came to mind without me having to think too long:
Some of these apps have come from people working in companies like Igalia, Opened Hand and Novell, some of them from students, some of them from hack weeks, all of them have some things in common - a sense of aesthetics and attention to the user experience, lightweight user interfaces ruthlessly focussed on a core usecase. And all serve their users well.
Another thing that many of them share is a sense of humour - when using Hamster or Cheese, you can’t help but feel that the author was having a ball.
Nothing in particular set me writing this, I just wanted to point out that there are many new applications aimed at the end user coming out of GNOME, humour and creativity still live here.
“We all have some learning to do” - that was the core message of Ari Jaaksi’s presentation, which has turned into a massive shitstorm over the past few days.
A few weeks ago, a new MediaWiki instance was installed by Ferenc Szekely of the maemo team, in response to numerous requests. Many people were not fans of Midgard’s user interface for the wiki, and missed a number of features available in other wiki software. And so we have been undertaking the second major migration for the maemo wiki (we previously moved from MoinMoin).
Over the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve been organising a small team which has moved over content from the old wiki, has worked on stylesheets, templates and categories which make sense, and we’re now ready to take the wraps off! Head on over to http://wiki.maemo.org and have a look.
This is not a finished work, like most wikis. Content in the “Midgard wiki” category needs review and editing, and a lot of theofficial documentation of maemo will be wikiised over the coming weeks and months. Some content still needs migrating and categorisation. But we have a decent start, an editing team, and the new wiki has already been baptised with its first couple of pages with over 100 edits: 100Days and 2010 Agenda.
Credit where credit’s due! The following people have been outstanding throughout the migration: GeneralAntilles, jaffa, Niels Breet, ludovicus, trickie and Navi. I’m probably leaving lots of people out but these guys have made their mark with me over the past couple of weeks.
