MeeGo Greeters launched for fora

Randall Arnold's "Greeters" programme, where willing volunteers maintain a common set of links and introductory material in their forum signatures, has now launched on the MeeGo forum. Announcing the widening of the initiative, Randall said, Right now I only have a very basic Greeter wiki page up and I will be fleshing it out more over time. The premise is very simple: use your signature to provide links to helpful MeeGo resources. Helping people after that is as simple as posting anything, anywhere here-- your signature does the real work!

Apps languishing in Testing despite being promotable

Slow application promotion due to limited testing has and continues to be a chronic problem for maemo.org. While work to improve awareness, enable super testers, and ongoing efforts to streamline testing with both testing software and server improvements are helping, more (and more active) testers are still needed to help push good software to Extras.

Attila Csipa's KISStester, mentioned earlier in this issue, is the only technological solution currently being discussed.

Sponsoring MeeGo conference attendance

Quim Gil has confirmed that the MeeGo Conference will follow the example of the two Maemo Summits and have the option of sponsoring attendance. Quim kicked off discussion as to how to decide who to sponsor: Usually it is a combination of approved speakers, renowned contributors of MeeGo and related projects and volunteers involved in the organization. We have to define if approved speakers and tech media would be sponsored from this budget or if there will be separate budgets to cover them. Anything else? His mail also included thoughts on budget, deadlines and who decides. The last of which triggered most discussion in the rest of the thread. Given the MeeGo community is still very young and raw, hopefully a mix of attendees will be sponsored; whether Maemo/Moblin old-hands, enthusiasts, community organisers or MeeGo core and application developers.

Conclusion on MeeGo Community OBS being able to target existing Nokia devices: not clear cut

Back in mid-June, David Greaves, Carsten Munk, Niels Breet and Andrew Flegg (your editor) co-signed an open letter on behalf of the Maemo development community to push for the MeeGo and Maemo community build systems to be co-hosted and co-managed. After a few words of encouragement, David and Niels continued with the plan. However, on MeeGo bug #615, Dawn Foster (Intel's MeeGo Community Manager) threw a spanner in the works earlier this week with a pretty blanket statement: The right place for Nokia proprietary binaries is on a Nokia-owned website. The community OBS will be hosted at OSU OSL under the Linux Foundation, and our agreements with them indicate that everything there must be open source. Proprietary company code isn't appropriate for the meego.com infrastructure. Some clarifications have been made, and the project has continued whilst this ruckus rolled on, with OBS being installed on the servers at OSU (with "tons of disk and a fair amount of CPU"). Once an audit is complete, and SSO tied up, it'll be ready to go live - pending the outcome of any decisions by the MeeGo community organisers. David Greaves is still hopeful for a positive resolution.