hello everybody my name is Dave as I'm sorry is it Ralph what Walter as Walter said and I am among other things that the doc master at the

MIMO.org doc master that means that I take care of managing the community managing of organizing the community effort around documentation and among other things I do organize the MIMO Community Council elections okay one

lesson that anybody here who's ever been to a technical conference knows there are always problems with Linux on oh is that what happened okay mirror

screens apply keep this configuration closed thank you very much good call

okay so today I'm going to present to you at the MIMO Community Council which hello I don't think so okay so today I'm going to present to you the MIMO

Community Council it's going to be weird wearing this without any amplification but that's okay which I think is an interesting case study of how one company has and they tried to enable an independent community to empower itself and and take some some more control of the project from from

from the company that initially sponsored the project so let's start off with the problem statement what what problem was the MIMO community trying to solve was the MIMO Community Council trying to solve and basically what you've got is and this is something that you see in an in an awful lot of

company run communities or company sponsored communities is that you've got your company down here that's kind of one entity and yet there are six thousand people in it and then you've got the community which is kind of another entity very little overlap typically and again you've got maybe three or

four thousand voices here and so it's very very hard for either side either as a community member looking in from looking into Nokia or as a Nokia employee working on MIMO looking at the community to try and and and get a coherent message coming across what does the MIMO community think the MIMO

community can think everything from you guys should be doing something more like Symbian to everything has to be free software it can be you know you guys need to be if it need to be a phone to we need a bigger screen you

guys need to do a net top right so there is all this divergent opinion in the MIMO community side and again on the Nokia side as an employee of Nokia do you have the authority to speak for Nokia probably not there's going to be in incoherent messages coming across from different working groups and what

not and it's very hard to identify the person that you should be talking to within Nokia for a component of the MIMO software software stack for example and so there's a small intersection and there there are many messages but no real coherent message coming across from either side and so the goal was to

have some kind of a group here and some kind of a group here that would condense condense and communicate with the MIMO community and condense and communicate with Nokia and make sure that the right connections were being

made now the problem is of course the communities are very diverse as I said earlier within the same community you have one announcement gets made there's a specific story that I'm thinking of where there was an announcement made of

I think it was when MIMO 4.1 came out the OS 2008 and our OS 2008.1 I can't remember exactly the version but there was a lot more free software in there there were some components which had been proprietary before which were released and there was one guy there was one kind of group of people who

were asking why is the contact application proprietary is there any business reason for the contact application to be proprietary which is a very reasonable situation to have and then a very reasonable opinion to have and then there was another group another very vocal group that said well

never mind the contact opinion everything should be free okay so as a Nokia director or as a Nokia manager looking in on this community you're saying okay so we can't do one maybe we can do the other but you know is that going to be enough to please the community we're always talking about the community this big vacuous cloudy thing so that's the problem so how did

we go about finding the solution of having the MIMO Community Council well back in Linux tag 2008 there was a brainstorm that the MIMO the great MIMO brainstorm was announced this was a period of I think two to three

weeks where ideas were invited things we should be doing things that the community should be doing things that Nokia should be doing to enable the community to be more proactive and so on and at the end of that brainstorming period we had two concrete plans one short term the hundred days plan and

one longer term which we call the 2010 roadmap these are the objectives that the MIMO community has between now and the end of the year and the 2010 roadmap you had things like enable community distributions co-production of documentation is in there open development ensure that Nokia developer

is working on the MIMO platform or working in the community and in the hundred days so kind of bigger hairier goals but they can be broken down into stages and the hundred days plan included among other things creating a MIMO.org Community Council and it's important to underline that this is a

community initiative it's not something that Nokia said we think that you guys should have representatives that we talk to and that's you know that's all we're going to deal with with the community this is people from within the community and oh that font is really really bad choice people from

within the community not the font the color anyway never mind so notably Jafa Lardman and General Lantias I think that's how he pronounces it also known as Andrew Flagg Simon Pickering and Ryan Abel those are the three people that specifically pushed the idea said you know we need to be

sending a more coherent message to Nokia so that they can treat us better so that they can move further along the line of what the critical mass of the community is expected and so as I said important to note that it's a community initiative but then again the issue with all of these kinds of

initiatives is that the idea is easy to express we want to represent the community to Nokia and we want Nokia to to empower the community as a whole through their interactions with excuse me I have some notes empower the whole

community through their interactions with with the council but the devil is in the details so once the idea came out it was there was a lot of detail work to to be decided and that really is where I think the lessons are can be

learned and you can go through that they kind of the reflection process that we went through and and how we arrived at the situation that that we got to in the end so the first detail which is very important I think it's a problem that pretty much every community has is if you're talking about

electing a council you're talking about elections you're talking about who can be a candidate and who gets to vote you're talking about in some sense establishing the notion of citizenship of belonging to who is a my mode org community member and it's you know pretty much every community has this

issue the gnome foundation for example has voting rights and and their their system is simply if you are proposed by you you propose yourself for membership and you give a certain number of referees so you're in some

sense co-opted into the foundation as a member and that's how you get your vote other organizations you pay a bucket load of money that's the way limo foundation membership works or the Eclipse foundation membership works although I think they now have individual membership as well do they I don't know

how does how does how does fedora handle this issue do they have for fedora elections are there fedora elections okay so so again that so

this is a voting system I guess you can repeat your what you're saying so in the in the federal community yeah it's on it's on okay so in the federal community we have different boats which are according to the different parts of

the project so as other PM the ambassadors the marketings and all those borders actually elected based on the community so any people which has an account on the federal system can actually vote for the people which are part of the board okay so so this is getting an account on the fedora system again this is another criteria and this is one that came up

in in my mode org is do we consider anybody who has an account on my mode org to be a member of the community it's something that you can do with zero effort requires no implication of the project you can create an account leave it alone just to I don't know sign up to a forum or something leave it alone

forever you know send one message leave it alone forever and then ten years later you still have a vote in the MIMO Community Council is that the way that we want to vote and we had very definitely two schools of thought in the MIMO community with regard to this issue there was one school of thought that said well we need to make sure that the MIMO Council is a group of

doers a group of people who have contributed to the MIMO project in the past and those have shown in some sense they're they're worth that's a not a very good way of putting it but you get the idea and then you had the second school of thought which said that well you know isn't that all

going to come out in the wash if we give everybody who has a MIMO org account this is everybody who has ever expressed an interest in MIMO if we give them all a vote well then obviously the people who are not so not so implicated in the project are not going to vote the people who are very implicated in the project are going to know who's worthwhile who's

going to be a good representative or not all right so there was a kind of a compromise we had and the compromise was to use camera karma now for those of you who aren't familiar with the MIMO.org community there's a concept of karma is that as you do stuff in MIMO.org you get karma points so if you

release a product you get karma points based on the fact that you release a product if the product goes on to be popular and gets a good rating from the users then your karma goes up if you are a member of a number of projects a number of sub projects your karma goes up if you

send email to a mailing list or if you post to to a forum your karma goes up and fixing bugs in bugzilla is another example of a kind of thing that gives you karma blog posts and so on and so over time people who do

stuff tend to have their karma go up to a certain level and so we we decided that we're going to use karma as the criteria for both being a candidate in the election we said you need a hundred karma which meant that there was roughly about 400 people who could be candidates and to vote you needed 25 karma which meant that we were we had a potential a potential electorate of

I think about 1,800 people for the first election and indeed for the first election there was a major issue because the talk forums which is a kind of a sub project of MIMO which was very very distinct really you had it was it was a

site called internet tablet talk which was not part of my mother and you had a whole bunch of people who were there giving user support helping people out giving feedback on the platform and so on but it was essentially very very isolated from my mother even the people who were on the mailing list didn't know what was going to what was going on on the forum and so on the forum when

people said well you're going to have an election who are these people going to be representing they're not going to be representing me because I don't even have a vote and so for the first election we gave pretty much anybody who had a MIMO.org account a vote and yet we kept them the karma requirement for for being a candidate for the elections and in set in following

elections and we've we've we've integrated karma as something that that you get from block from from forum posts this is again this is kind of controversial within the MIMO community because it's somebody who does a thousand forum posts contributing positively to the MIMO community or

not and that really depends on what they're saying so it's a tough problem and this is this this is the way we solved it in any case some of the questions that we had when we were talking about elections was how long is

the term going to be and there you've got the balancing act between asking people to commit a lot of time and a lot of effort and potentially be in the be in a role for maybe a couple of years or you know having elections all the time and if you look at the timeline of an election from counting

back from the day that you declare the results the day before you close the votes one week before you open the votes one week before you close the nominations for the election and one week before that you open the nominations for the election so you've got a month from the moment that you announce the election date and open the nominations to the elections the

result being announced so if you've got a month of a process for an election process which is I think a reasonably short probably I think the Gnome Foundation takes six weeks from the time that the election is announced until the the the results are in if you're holding an election every three months then you're always in election mode you're never giving your

council enough time to to actually you know take take on the role and take on the mantle of the community representation that they're being given so there were a lot of other questions to deal with with elections as well what's the voting method that you're going to use and I know this is

one that comes up in every single community we did have some criteria that we felt were were important for a voting method one was that we wanted to avoid very polarizing characters and MIMO is a community where you've

got two divergent some very divergent views and there are people who are very very vocal who have a very strong following and yet don't represent even a significant minority of the MIMO community so we wanted to have an election method which was not first past the post our first five past the post

because the we were saying to ourselves in that kind of a situation somebody who has 15% support of the community will get a seat on the election and may be a negative influence on the on the the operation of the council whereas if you do something like a proportional

representation or a preference voting if that person is first preference for 14-15% of the community and last preference for everybody else then the chances are he's not going to get the seat on the council so we're avoiding very polarizing characters and avoiding making the council ineffectual

by having that constant flame war type environment going on in the council in council meetings and in council interactions so we wanted to avoid that type of that type of character we wanted to avoid a complicated election system we wanted to make sure that it was easy to vote and that it was easy

to understand how your vote was going to be counted and it was easy to count the votes so and easy to verify the result so that automatically kind of punched Condorcet methods out of the out of the sea we did nobody

understands Condorcet okay two people understand Condorcet I'm sorry nobody really understands Condorcet so so yes you can only count Condorcet elections with software basically it's difficult to count them by hand it is

it is so there was there was a kind of a fairly serious support within the community for what's called preference voting not preference voting satisfaction voting so I can't remember the exactly the the name of

the voting system that was proposed but the idea is simply that you give every candidate a score from 0 to 100 and and you figure out you know if somebody if somebody yeah you kind of like the guy you might give him a 70 and if you really don't like him you give him a zero and if you really really want this guy to be on the on the on the board you're going to give

him 100 and then it all comes out in the wash and you get your everybody gets their more or less favorite candidates but that kind of voting system is again very difficult to verify and gives you these really weird results where nobody is happy nobody has their favorite choice elected everybody has their kind of yeah middle-of-the-road candidate selected so the the voting

system we chose was a single transferable vote with fractional transfer of votes so the idea is you vote one two three four five for your five favorite candidates you can go all the way to nine or ten or eleven if there are eleven candidates and then votes transfer if your favorite candidate

gets eliminated or elected then your second favorite candidate will get either the whole vote if your favorite candidate is eliminated or a part of that vote if your favorite candidate is elected and there's a surplus to be distributed to other people so it's a fairly simple election system it's

hand-counted in places like Ireland and New Zealand, Australia, Malta they use that system but without the fractional transfer fractional transfer means that the result is reproducible because if you don't use fractional transfer what's used in Ireland is what they call random transfer that means that if you have a quota of a hundred once you get to 100 votes you're elected

somebody goes to 110 random transfer you will take ten of the 110 ballots and look at who's the second preference randomly and then allocate those votes to the other goals to the other candidates that are that are second preference so handy system it's useful but it means that if you

recount an election twice you can get two different results which isn't very which isn't very nice so we chose fractional transfer which basically is hand countable but it's much easier with software okay so that's for the

nitty-gritty of how are the council going to get elected and who can be a candidate and who can get a vote the next question the major question is what are the council going to do and you know it's not a straightforward

question it's it's okay now we've got people who to represent us you know go represent us so the council took on some fairly major responsibilities the mission statement if you like of the council was to distill and focus community ideas to set priorities for the community to represent community

majority community ideas and community opinions to Nokia and to communicate official Nokia responses to have kind of a in some sense a privileged communication channel with Nokia and to communicate those official Nokia responses to the community at large so the council works closely with Nokia

representatives both technical and community marketing basically Kim Gill is is the the community marketing guy in in in Nokia and the council works very closely with him but the goal of course is to encourage Nokia to and

Nokia employees to become a tighter-knit part of the my mode dot our community itself right so to have Nokia developers developing in a public Gator subversion to have the Nokia developers be consider themselves my mother community members really that's that that's the end goal so this is

the that the community is not only communicating with these special Nokia representatives that's what I want to communicate one other responsibilities that they took on a fairly major one is managing in quotes the my model or

team this is one of the things that Nokia did very early on in the in the project which is I think very novel in turn in terms of other community of other community corporate projects corporate community projects I don't know how you how would you say that corporate sponsored community

projects something like that they hired people from the community to do stuff for the community and and no you don't you don't answer to answer to us we pay your paycheck but you don't answer to us so I'm the first guy that they chose was Neil's here that's Berlin so the beer wasn't as good as

this weekend and Neil's was hired from the community to be the webmaster so to take care of my model or infrastructure he's since grown out of that grown even further in that role and he's now you know developing software taking care of the infrastructure and managing in some sense the rest of the

team Andre clapper came on board around the same time as me that's me and he's the bug master so this is somebody who's making sure that bugs that come into my model or bugzilla recruiting a team as well obviously from from the community but making sure that bugs that come into my model or

bugzilla triaged pointed that the right person has pointed to them and that the bugs are qualified if there are duplicates their practice duplicates very quickly and so on it keeps it keeps the bug database very clean and makes it much easier for professional developers to work with this is Nokia developers again a lot of them were not community developers

before that they would there were not free software developers so they're kind of still getting used to this way of working having a bug a bug master makes that a lot easier and then I was the doc master managing documentation and doing a lot of event management and organizing elections and things like that since then we've we've now got a

deb master who I was hoping would be here who helps people from the community with packaging issues helps them package their software and make sure that it's distributed we've got a dist master Karsten Monk who is working on mayor working on a community distribution paid by Nokia and

we've got a talk master this is somebody who's taking care of the community forums that I mentioned earlier and he again is is paid by Nokia to maintain and and develop the the community forums so we've got a team now of six people that the MIMO community council sorry are managing directly setting our priorities we meet them

every month and review the tasks we've we've committed to the year before that the month before and plan the tasks for the next month and this is a major responsibility so you've gone from being in just a simple community a community member you get elected and all of a sudden you're

a member of a five-person management team right so it's it's it's it's been a transitional period but you can imagine what it was like before when we were answering to the community you know how does how does a community of 3,000 people set direction for somebody right so essentially we were just doing whatever we felt was most necessary and if people you know complained too much

then we said well maybe we should be doing something else having the the council there and having that feedback constantly is is definitely a big improvement for me and even they had hiring responsibilities when when we

hired when Nokia hired Jeremiah to be the dead master our contracted Jeremiah to be the dead master it was the MIMO.org team that ran the interviews sent out a job announcement decided what the what the the role was going to entail what type of person they were looking for and I helped them

with that but but it would they were the ones who made the final decision here's our choice Nokia please fund this person most companies wouldn't do that kind of thing I think it's a it's admirable that Nokia are going in that direction and and and you know in some sense giving giving a group of people that they have absolutely no control over responsibility over you

significant resources in terms of in terms of the financial cost of six employees so the inaugural council was elected in September 2008 that's Berlin again we were back there for the MIMO summit five members the

chairman is elected by the council it's a small group so more versatile much easier to get agreement but sufficiently large that we reflect the diversity of the community and it's been a positive experience we've had some difficulties for sure some of the difficulties have been getting

candidates we've had for most of the elections there have been between nine and twelve candidates so it's the same problem I think that the gnome foundation has is that people see it as a big task which is why we limited the why we limited the the term to six months because it's something that you

can do for six months and then say okay I've I've done my part and pass on we've had some so let me see what was that oh yes the difficulties were the community schism I mentioned with you that for the first election we

essentially said there's no going to be no camera response camera requirement to vote in the election anybody who has a MIMO.org account can do that but then this was a huge flame war that came back for us the second election what do you mean I need 25 karma to be to be able to vote I voted in the last election right and so we had to have a referendum to settle the issue for once and for all we did that on the second election and now I

think that the karma issue is pretty much settled karma calculations are continually being refined yes sorry there was a referendum to find out

who's eligible for voting who was eligible for absolutely circular issue so that was the Community Council that decided and they said okay people who have an account before X date and have 25 karma get to vote in the

referendum controversial decision absolutely so the karma issues and basically karma calculation has since been been addressed as well so we have had difficulties but we've had significant successes one of them I've mentioned already the council has taken on considerable responsibility

they've hired a member of the community to help the community with packaging they've had on several occasions confidential information that's been passed to them without an NDA from Nokia which is something that Nokia has never done and said okay you guys are the MIMO Community Council we trust you you know we can't tell this to 3,000 people because it's going

to be on the front page of newspapers but you know get ready we're going to be releasing something next week or this feature is in the next release and we want to start having people talking to it who do you suggest we should talk to from the community and so on so the council has really been a figurehead for putting engaged community members in connection

with the right people within Nokia to make sure that that community empowerment is happening oh we've also we've also taken care of the rebranding of the website that was a community MIMO community initiative coordination of the content of the MIMO summit so this is community organized summit now

for the most part two days out of three was completely community organized and choosing applications from the community to community developed applications for special attention so that they would be ported to MIMO 5 and in advance so that there would be some funding available to ensure that

that developers were working on them and basically as I said serving as a funnel to make sure that the the best people for attention in the community get get that attention from Nokia and we've got a very positive community experience moving forward next MIMO Community Council election is

coming up next month and the next and so there you go the MIMO Community Council is the voice of the community thank you very much I've left ten minutes for questions so does anybody have any questions yes they will use

the mics quick words on on the general satisfaction of the community after everything has been deployed I mean something that you have been saying within the community do you think that some there are still some people who maybe just drop the community because they didn't like the

way things were going or just I saw a constant complaint it's just something that is quite well there's you can never please all the people all the time and in fact you can never please all the people any of the time in in the MIMO community because there are people who as I said it's a diverse

community and there are you know there are opposite polar opposites in there people are attracted to the device and if you're a device geek then maybe you're not that into free software and people are attracted to the software platform and if you're a free software geek then maybe you're not so interested in making compromises to have the device work magnificently right

so there is the we want everything open a school of thought and there is the this hardware sucks school of thought and there is and there is a there are people who complain for everything there is the there are people

who this is too expensive there are people who will say anything from all of the range of complaints that you can possibly imagine about a telephone or about an internet device that we get we get them all you can't keep everybody happy but I think that the overall satisfaction level of the community has dramatically improved from three years ago and if you think of

five years ago when the when the first MIMO release came out or five years ago when the Nokia 770 came out this was essentially you know it was a community project they were working with upstream projects within Nokia for sure but there was essentially no hooks there for people to start hacking on

the software right the essentially the way that people contributed to the MIMO community was to write MIMO applications there most of the platform was not closed because most of the platform was open but upstream so it

was a kind of a big gelatinous blob right I think that's improved because we've made sure that that the community has has been more empowered we've made sure that they feel listened to represented I think that Nokia

developers now understand the community better and are starting to engage the community more it's a constant process so it's it's like it's a gradient but this has been from if you think of from the from the days the 770 to now there's absolutely no difference it's light-years apart if the next

speaker wants to come up and set up their laptop I'm perfectly happy with them doing that by the way good are there any other questions about the the Community Council in in itself people interested in the the governance

model or yeah I'm sorry but I don't really know what MIMO what is the piece of software what is the platform for I'm sorry about that so it could be you can just say in two words what it is for I can't have me to understand the kind of pieces you may be facing I'm sorry so MIMO is Linux

kernel based software platform which is installed on devices like this this is a phone it doesn't have a SIM card in it right now but that one does so it's it's it's a complete software stack so MIMO is a distribution in some

sense which is why I guess I'm here it's a it's a Debian based distribution for mobile devices okay of this kind of form factor and what were the I'm sorry those weren't two words but yeah and what are the strategic decision that you

got that you know the concept is facing or the community facing just to have an idea of where are the key key hot issues that they they either the community and the governance system that has been put in place are taken by now the key hot issues right I saw some of the keys so that I can I can

start having idea of the what are the kind of pieces that you have to address well at this point I I did mention that there are some closed components there are some closed source components in the platform and so it's a constant process of getting the things that can be opened opened there's obviously their their partner agreements and there are all sorts of

reasons why things might be closed but the idea is that anything that can be open should be open and that's a that's a constant process ensuring that for example documentation is developed in the community this is I say documentation because my my thing ensuring the documentation is written in

the community rather than behind closed doors and then you get a hundred pages of docs dumped over the wall that's the kind of that's the kind of thing that I'd like to ensure that we're so we've for example all of our docs are in wiki almost all of our docs are in wiki so thank you very much I'm

going to be around all weekend and I will leave the stage to the next speaker