I just was able to release the second part of the posts. For full version, see http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/discussion-23-what-people-want-openmoko-to-do/
################################ This is the part two of the post series discussing the status of the Openmoko community. The discussion is split in three posts to make it easier to read. This first post discussed the status of the community and the third will discuss one of the possible solutions to improve communication. In this second part we will discuss the expectations people have for the software or simply what people want Openmoko to do. What people want.. People always want something.. In this case there are not much people can demand Openmoko does. Openmoko has their own plans for the future and if they see that they can use community for something, I hope they'll do it. If not then.. that's life. But here are some expectations the community members have on Openmoko. The comments without the e-mail addresses are from community mailing list, the rest from the comments of my previous post. Remember, these are only parts from the messages so please check the original posts for more details! <!-- to see the removed comments , see http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/discussion-23-what-people-want-openmoko-to-do/ --> Having several (forked) distros around is okay if the fork developers really want to take a completely new direction. If the devels feel a need to fork because it's in one way or another difficult to contribute (no SVN access or something), then I think there's something wrong in the community and project management. I don't know what's the case in Openmoko. From what I know, FDOM was created to add all the community applications to the original Openmoko 2008.x so it seems to make sense though I don't know if it has to be a distro and not a add-on package or install script to 2008.x but that was not the topic of this post… > October 7, 2008 at 7:47 am / mwester > Well said. Openmoko sold a vision, and found an eager audience. > Unfortunately, they didn't seem to have any idea what to do with that shared > vision — > as a result, the community gradually dispersed and fragmented. > But all is not lost, by any means. As long as people complain about the > situation, there > is hope — they still care. Openmoko needs to look very closely at the > data that only *they* can see: > Openmoko — how many are subscribed to your email lists? How many of them > are active > (i.e. have sent an email in the past 6 months)? Now, how many phones did > you sell, Openmoko? > Openmoko — where are those thousands of missing phones? Are they in desk > drawers? > Cardboard shoe boxes in closets? Dust bins? More importantly, where are > those thousands of > potential contributors, potential ambassadors, your in-the-field sales > force for selling both > the vision and the phones? > The hardware and software problems are trivial in comparison to the loss > of the community > mindshare — and ultimately that goes beyond a vision and goes to the > bottom line. > Openmoko had better hire a community manager, not for the community's sake > (although we'd certainly welcome such a person), but for their own > business survival. Mwester said it better than I was able to. I might not be quite that pessimistic but I think that the community would be able to do more than it currently does if properly managed and empowered. This includes both developers and users, there's no reason to make a division here! Next post will discuss one of the possible solutions to the communication problem. #################### to see the original post, see http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/discussion-23-what-people-want-openmoko-to-do/ r -- | risto h. kurppa | risto at kurppa dot fi | http://risto.kurppa.fi _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community