Well, I've decided to toss my hat into the ring for the Hildon Foundation Board election.
Most of you who've been around the Maemo Community for a while probably know me. If not personally, I'd guess through reputation, but for those of you who don't: Hello, my name is Ryan Abel. I go by GeneralAntilles online. I've owned a Maemo device since the beginning of 2006 (around the time the 770 became available in the US), and began participating on Internet Tablet Talk at that time. I began contributing seriously to Maemo in 2007 when timeless helped get me involved in bugzilla. In 2008, Andrew Flegg (Jaffa) proposed an idea that would help put the Maemo Community in charge of its own direction. Jaffa's idea became the Maemo Community Council. Simon Pickering (lardman) and myself were involved with helping Jaffa to bring that idea into fruition. All three of us served on the inaugural council (myself, as a rather inexperienced chair) and on the 2nd council (and Jaffa and I on the 4th council). Since then, I've been involved with bugzilla, the wiki, and various community facilitation issues. I've also been one of the editors (along with Jaffa and fiferboy) bringing you MWKN for the past two years. Although Maemo is not as much in my daily life as it has been (I'm using a BlackBerry Z10 these days), it still holds an important place in my heart. It's the community that introduce me to, and got me involved in, open source; has given me the opportunity to attend international conferences; and introduced me to close friends from all over the planet. I want to help ensure that it remains as vibrant a community as it always has been. The Hildon Foundation has had a rough start. Politics and personal grand visions have taken a front seat to the foundation's primary mission: ensuring the continued operation of maemo.org and its services for the Maemo Community. Despite these diversions, the foundation has raised enough money to keep mameo.org running, and heroic volunteer efforts from the community have provided the expertise to ensure that maemo.org's complex infrastructure operates more smoothly than it has in the past (and stays operating). (I won't name names, but make sure you thank your volunteer sysops! These skilled individuals have taken on a very complex, and time consuming, project in volunteering to maintain maemo.org.) I have one goal in mind in running for the Hildon Foundation Board: to help make keeping maemo.org running as painless as possible. Long-term, the community may need to branch out. An obsolete, unsupported platform is not going to provide the fertile soil to maintain a vibrant community forever. But, ultimately, any growth into new focuses must be organic and bottom-up. Strategic partnerships with Jolla, Canonical, Qt or whomever established by the Hildon Foundation will not be productive unless a large percentage of the community's interest is focused on those things. maemo.org's power is found in the multitude of individuals who contribute to it in a wide variety of ways. Individuals in the community must be the ones to steer the direction of the community, not dictates and decrees from a board of facilitators. I hope to assist in keeping this community healthy from the Hildon Foundation Board (if you all will have me). This is an important time for the Maemo Community to determine its future direction, and I want to help ensure that we are able to do so.
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