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Community Council/Council election September 2012/Candidate declarations

Latest revision as of 21:38, 3 May 2013

[edit] Candidates for September 2012 Maemo Community Council elections

1. Alexander Kozhevnikov / Mentalist Traceur
2. Iván Gálvez Junquera / ivgalvez
3. Joerg Reisenweber / joerg_rw
4. Michael Demetriou / qwazix
5. Niel Nielsen / nieldk

[edit] Candidates for September 2012 foundation Board of Directors elections

1. Craig Woodward / woody14619
2. Iván Gálvez Junquera / ivgalvez
3. Niel Nielsen / nieldk
4. Randall Arnold / Texrat
5. Tim Samoff / timsamoff

[edit] Candidate declarations

[edit] Mentalist Traceur

For those who don't know, I'm Mentalist Traceur on the forums. My user account on the remainder of the maemo.org site is mtraceur. After considering the comments that have grown in the last day and a half or so on the thread here ( http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=87061 ) it seems to me that it would be best (although I might regret mentioning it again if it leads to even more quarreling) to throw my self-nomination into here. I believe this is the correct location for these things?

If it's not accepted due to the lateness, that's fine, I will still contribute to the community as my time and ability permits. But it seemed like there was some interest in having me run, so in the event that the final decision is to accept me, this is here already. I am also going to make a post in the thread aforementioned (in case the mailing list guts out urls for some reason, I am referring to the "Last Call for Council Nominations and Bylaws Review" thread), with commentary more relevant to the discussion going on there, but some of which (such as the "if you were sufficiently interested in running, you wouldn't have missed the deadline" criticism) is relevant to whether or not people view me as a worthy candidate. Anyway:

For starters, joerg_rw/DocScrutinizer, I sincerely appreciate you dropping your nomination acceptance, to allow me to run - I am uncertain as to what the ultimate interpretation of the rules will be used to deal with this now (i.e. will the community ultimately decide to insert me or anyone else into the running as a result or not), but at the same time, I would like you to know that you didn't have to do that. The community could benefit from you - quite possibly more than from me.

Second, I want everyone to understand that I do not want to be added into the running IF there's good reason to think that the only ways of doing so would be to the detriment of the community. I.e. if doing so forces the elections to grind to a standstill for a month, or even delays it by more than a week at most, as I think someone has suggested it would, there's almost no way anything I could bring to either council or board would offset the time lost. I expressed an interest in adding my name for the same reasons I hope and suppose everyone else did - out of interest in benefiting the community. If me offering up a late self-nomination is going to cause fracturing at such a critical time, that would be contrary to the whole point of me running anyway.

That said: I hereby self-nominate myself, for both Community Council and the Board. I will be happy to serve the community in either position, and I nominate myself for both because I think it is better for the community to have the choice of putting me into either. (In the event that this at all comes up, if my late nomination is accepted for one but not the other, I have no qualms with that.)

I've been part of the community since June 2010, when I first got an N900 - I browsed the talk.maemo.org forum for a couple months before that, but wasn't active until after I got an N900 myself. I owe my entire programming and Linux-savvy skillsets' development to this community - if it weren't for an N900, I never would've gotten into either of those things, and would have admired FOSS projects from afar, agreeing with the ideals but never really getting involved. I'll admit that my contributions have not been nearly as significant or game changing as that of many community members. I merely took over maintenance of the aircrack-ng and macchanger tools, after the previous maintainer no longer had time, and got the aircrack-ng (and its dependency iw) package down to extras, which it hadn't been before. I also maintain an alpine port in the repository, but that's not used much afaik. I wrote a command-line tool for reading/writing r&d mode flags from on-device, unfortunately one that depends on Nokia's proprietary libcal-dev package/library, but this was heavily based on a GUI program that did the same thing made by qwerty12. Beyond that I've at most a couple other tidbits of code-involving contributions. The majority of my time in the community, has been doing my best trying to help other users based on the knowledge that I myself learned. Lately I've managed to do less of this than, say, the year prior, but I try to do it when I have the chance.

The main reason I think I might be useful to the community as a whole, is this: To this day, I look out at all of the other devices out there, and I don't see something I could enjoy nearly as much. If this community fails, if the user base and/or ability to maintain and update these devices easily is fragmented into tiny little pieces of obscure privately maintained back-up repositories and other forums, I have a lot to lose. And I know that there are plenty of other users for whom nothing else on the market than their current devices is desirable, who feel the same way. I've said it before on the forums - I have never had another technological device provide me with as much happiness and quality-of-life increase as my N900 did. And I recognize that the FOSS nature of both a good chunk of the software, and the adherence to FOSS principles by many in the community itself, is what allowed this family of devices to be this for many members. According to the the proposed bylaws for Hildon Foundation, "The mission of the Foundation is to promote and progress the future availability of maemo derived or inspired open source software, and related toolkits, for mobile devices. ... Further, the Foundation may promote and advocate for the availability of mobile devices which have open source software and/or open hardware architectures." - this is not just a goal I approve of - it's a goal that is /extremely/ in-line with what I would like to see happen in the world, the sooner the better. Whether elected or not, I would do what I am able to help further this goal, not only because this community, and the family of devices it supports, are valuable to both me and the community, but also because I would consider it my ethical duty to do so. Of course, that motivation is there regardless of whether my self-nomination is accepted or not, or if I'm elected to either position - but being in said position(s) would, I suspect, allow me to do more towards those ends.

Thank you for your time and consideration, to all who read this.

[edit] woody14619

[strike]I'm Woody14619 on TMO and currently a member of the Maemo Council.

During my last run for Council, my stated intention was to increase the visibility and transparency of the operation of Council. During my term, I saw to it that there were weekly open meetings with minutes presented to the community on the Council blog (usually in a timely fashion). I also got involved in a number of other activities that were Council and community related, and hope that those efforts have been (and will continue to be) seen as positive steps taken to help the community.

Unfortunately, my day job has begun to cycle up for it's typical busy season of October through March. Part of the reason I agreed to run for the current cycle was because I knew I would have the time to dedicate in the summer period. I equally know that my time will be limited for the next cycle.

As a result, I do not feel it would be beneficial to the community for me to run for Council again this cycle. I will not have the time to invest as I did this cycle, beyond offering the minimal service of creating meeting minutes. If someone else nominates me, I will stand for the position, but I will not nominate myself knowing the limited time I will have for the position.

I would however, like to nominate myself for the Board, with that caveat that my participation would be minimal for the October to March time frame. That alone will probably find me last in the list, meaning I would not be on the Board unless several others nominate themselves at the last minute. None the less, I would like to apply.

Regardless of the outcome of the election, I pledge to offer any aid I can to the next Council and/or Board, and will make efforts to continue to participate in any public meetings of both bodies.[/strike]

[edit] ivgalvez

I'm known as ivgalvez at TMO and I'm currently member of the Maemo Council. I joined this community in September 2011, just after receiving my N900, and I started to participate in it, with a passion and interest I haven't felt before in any other open source community I knew.

As current Council Member, I feel that I have the responsibility to help finishing the transition process to a self sustained NFP entity that we have started. I am one of the three signers in the articles of incorporation, with Woody14619 and SD69, and I think that I should help in the first steps of foundation as an independent entity.

I also joined the Council with high hopes for fixing the long-standing problems we have with the infrastructure, but we haven't succeeded yet. In fact, this was my main goal when I run for latest Council election, now I only hope that with a real entity (Board) sustaining the community, we could have better results in the upcoming months.

Considering the low number of candidates we have at this moment, I have finally decided to run for both groups, Board and Council, despite my public preference about having separate groups.

[edit] joerg_rw

since I'm short of time right now (alas this won't change for whole term, I promise), I just like to post a "I accept" here, since ivgalvez pushed me by mentioning there's only 5h left to do so.

I'm not promising I'll invest more of my time than available (which is pretty little, maybe even as small as 2h/week) into the task, and I'm accepting just to not let maemo down. No self-advertisements here right now, those who know me will also know whether to vote for me or not. Just one statement: In my book both council and board are *services* brought to community since community needs them. I'm not interested in any "internal" power (definitely falsely) attributed by some to either of those positions, I will exploit all the power/opportunities that such a position might give, to bring maemo ahead or at least keep it alive. But I'm neither maemo's master nor your referee, and I hope you'll call me out on that if ever my notion regarding that seems to have changed. I'm ready to help as much as my spare time and knowledge allows, and that's it. I'm not promising to become a better diplomat, I know my soft skills are poor regarding that, please excuse me already. Nor will I hold back with my notions regarding particular details of development or maintenance. I think and hope I could still act as a normal community member regarding that, and I hope you won't read every of my comments like I had a council hat on, it doesn't fit my head ;-). Now it's up to you.

[edit] qwazix

I want to help. That's it. I've been trying to squeeze my head to think of a candidate declaration but I don't think I can come up with one. One thing that you need to know is that I believe that a community like us is going to fade away without devices, so I will do whatever I can so that we can have a new reference device, be it something community sponsored, or an adaptation for an unlocked device that's already out there from a reputable manufacturer, or a jolla device or something.

A little bit about myself: I am 27 years old, I live in Athens, Greece and I am a civil engineer, currently working as a web developer and graphics designer. I love mobile devices, open software, movies and photography, among other things. I am very much into user interface design, and I like to try every diverse device out there and keep the best ideas in mind. My first encounter with maemo was when I played with a friend's 770, but I came here to maemo.org with my N900, which I bought in an impulse. I had hardly used linux until then and I had never coded anything else than java (and a little bit of pascal). As the months passed, I wanted to have the experience I got on my phone on my pc too - I know this happens usually the other way around - and now I am an everyday linux user. I also got my hands dirty in qt trying to make speedcrunch a little bit more touch friendly. In the meantime, while the N900 always bulged in one pocket, the other pocket changed tenants quickly. Symbian was replaced by android and that with WP. When the N9 came around that pocket got a resident too. The N9 for some weird reason made me want to code for it more than the N900 did, and so contactLaunch, mobilecrunch and rawcam came to life. Recently I bought a N810 so that I get a little bit of maemo history in my hands.

I haven't lived in many online communities but I find maemo to be cosy and friendly, and I want that to continue. I love the fact that people who moved to other devices still stay around and discuss, and that even threads like xxx vs Nxxx are still civilised and have useful discussion in them among the inevitable argument. I appreciate that most people here love their devices, yet they provide pretty objective opinions when a newcomer asks for advice.

[edit] nieldk

I'm known as nieldk at TMO and I'm currently member of the Maemo Council. I joined this community just after receiving my N900, and I started to participate in it when development for mobile backtrac started. Since i later obtained the n9 my focus is on the Harmattan platform,especially kernel development.

As current Council Member, I feel like my fellow councelars, that I have the responsibility to help finishing the transition process to a self sustained NFP entity that we have started.

I also joined the Council with high hopes for better relationship with Nokia and more focus on the Harmattan platform. Due to the new situation in Nokia, this has largely failed, since focus had to shift to keep our community at all. Also, lately, I ran into some serious personal matters in my relationship with my wife, which have taken quite a serious amount of time to solve -happy to say it has settled now to a more stable situation.

[edit] Texrat

Like my good friend Tim Samoff, I am submitting myself as a candidate for the Hildon Foundation board.

Those who know me are familiar with my qualifications. For those who don't, here's a synopsis:

1. Former Nokia quality engineer for early Maemo devices
2. Prominent member of N800 launch team
3. Early member of Internet Tablet Talk and maemo.org; helped develop community
4. maemo.org forum moderator
5. creator of Maemo (and MeeGo) Greeters program
6. MeeGo community office member; created and coordinated device program
7. 3-term maemo.org council member
8. 2 term (and current) Nokia Developer Champion

Regardless of where my career and interests have taken me, I am a strong advocate of open source, both software and hardware. In addition to Maemo and MeeGo involvement, I am also heavily plugged into 3D printing communities and pushing for increased opportunities for community contributions to device ecosystems (phone cases, sim card adapters, etc).

I've been very concerned with the negative tone I see permeating our community and i would like to see us work at dispelling that. We started as a can-do collective of passionate, talented people and I would like to see that spirit renewed. I have hope that the Hildon Foundation will be sufficiently empowered to turn this thing around!

[edit] timsamoff

While I've been silent on the mailing list and TMO for a while, I've continued to lurk and participate in other venues like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, I still submit Maemo news to mwkn.net often.

But, that's all moot in my mind.

Most of you who know me will hopefully agree that I am passionate, dedicated, hard working member who has put countless time and effort into the Maemo cause. I have served on three terms of the Maemo Community Council (one of those terms as the Chair); I have spearheaded several community efforts (the m.o website redesign, contests, application development, UI/UX improvement, conferences, etc.); I have presented talks; I've volunteered; etc.

Most of your who know me will also know that none of this work was done from a developer's point of view. I came to the Maemo Community as a user (the N800 was my first Maemo device) and that's how I initially got involved. My first involvement was in the discussion forums (back then it was still itT) [0]. Then, I moved on to lodging bug reports [1]. Then, since I am a designer, I began helping folks with graphics and UI design. The list could go on and on, but my main point is just that I am really still who I was back when my N800 first arrived in the mail: a passionate user. In fact, my main handset (by choice, not by necessity) is the Nokia N950.

One must possess 100 Karma points or more to be nominated for this position. I have 1,586 [2].

While I haven't been interested in taking part in Council business over the last couple of years, I am still very interested in seeing the advancement of (and even helping to steer) the community into the future. I don't see a lot of hope for Maemo as a specific "product" of any sort (which, in the end, may end up disqualifying me from running for this position), but I am still very hopeful for the community at large. Maemo is more than just a product anyway, it's a philosophy. And, more than any other open source community that I've been involved with, Maemo community members are the most transparent, dedicated, and involved in the life of that philosophy.

I would be honored to come back aboard with a group of whose job is to negotiate this community's future.

[0] http://bit.ly/UHQYnK

[1] http://bit.ly/PfAjDZ

[2] http://bit.ly/OEcTJb