[Meego-community] Community working group - status update

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

ext Andrew Flegg wrote:
> Over time, I'd hope that some of these working groups - and, in
> particular, the Community Working Group - would have representatives
> of the wider MeeGo community on them. Since we're not entirely sure
> what the shape of that community is, now's not the time; but perhaps
> in future some kind of election might be in order.
> 
> I'd certainly hope that it wouldn't just be the TSG annointing people,
> say a year from now.

The TSG appointment makes sense at the creation of working groups. After
that I would expect that the group leadership would be defined by the
own group dynamics. "Some kind of election" can include e.g. candidates
and votes among the own working group members in an extraordinary
meeting. Anyway, we will have time to discuss this.


> I wonder if we'll suffer the same problem we had on
> maemo.org: lack of volunteer contributions once there was a paid
> contributor in a role. Admittedly, for things with a lower barrier of
> entry - such as bug triaging - we had the bug squad which was full of
> community members; but web infrastructure was largely in the hands of
> Niels and other paid contributors.
>
> I wonder if this was due to the technology, or some kind of perception
> of "well, he's being paid to do it, so why should I do it for free?".
> Probably a combination of both.

I have been in free software projects made 100% out of volunteers and
there was also problems finding volunteers for the web infrastructure.
Low entry barriers (as opposed to 'from zero to root') and well known
tools do help.


>     "Nokia is keeping the current contracts with the maemo.org team
>      regardless of MeeGo and the intention is to keep doing with
>      this budget whatever is preferred by the community."
> 
> Which community is this, the Maemo or MeeGo one? There are still lots
> of tasks on maemo.org, but I'd want Niels' expertise brought to
> meego.com as well; and there are probably lots of questions there
> around priority and workloads.

True. If you ask me, I believe maemo.org (with all its weaknesses) it's
solid enough for the Maemo 5 wave. Some more polishing in the Extras QA
process benefiting Maemo 5 developers and users, and I think the rest is
ok to leave the lead to MeeGo.

Note also that currently Intel and Nokia are pooling resources, so it is
not that we have the same team having to take care now of two community
sites. Until now we have left the maemo.org devel team members to set
their own priorities. In this sense it would be useful to know where
Niels and others think their time would be better invested.

-- 
Quim Gil
open source advocate
Maemo Devices @ Nokia