Estel deselected as Council chair; discussions on legal entity

Editor: Andrew Flegg

In the Community Council meeting on Friday, the three members of the council in attendance (Craig Woodward, Niel Nielsen, RM Bauer) removed Piotr Jawidzyk as chair of the current council, and will discuss a replacement between themselves this week. Piotr, of course, remains a member of the council; but it seems the rest of the council decided to act after "confrontational" discussions with the community, often in light of the concern regarding the council awarding Community Awards' devices to themselves. In introducing the matter, Craig - as secretary - said: I think one clear item that has been agreed on in general is that Estel_ has been a bit harsher than most of us would like in recent dealings w/ the community.

There have been calls, by at least 3 Council now in as many weeks, for his removal as chair. Given that Estel has expressed he was willing to give up chair if Council agreed on the matter (see June 8th minutes) I propose we take such a vote, if not this meeting than next.

Other issues discussed in the meeting included potential resolutions to the "firestorm"; community OBS, and the servers on which they run; and moving to a "self-sustaining" legal entity.

The last item is particularly interesting, slthough it isn't clear exactly what the role and scope of this entity would be.

Migrating maemo.org to community-driven infrastructure

Editor: Ryan Abel

Part of the potential fallout from the layoffs and project reduction at Nokia is likely to be the cancellation of funding for maemo.org. This is likely to happen sooner rather than later given that maemo.org is on a 6-month contract period (currently through Nemein). Discussion about transitioning maemo.org to a community-driven infrastructure when Nokia funding is removed is ongoing on both the community mailing list and on Talk.Given the wide range of services provided by maemo.org and the cost of servers, let alone the labor to keep them running, any viable plan is likely to require the shutting down or migration of the resource intensive services (like the autobuilder).