Discussion 2/3: 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. The first post discussed the status of the community and the third discusses 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!

vasco.nevoa <vasco.nevoa@xxxxxxx>     Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 6:42 PM
And for god’s sake, AUDIO must work as intended by default (it IS a phone after all). Only after OM guarantees these minimum requirements can it ask the community to go ahead and innovate…  Don’t waste your time on GUIs or eye-candy apps; give us a device with a rock solid subsystem and a command shell, and we will fill in the blanks and build from there.

t m <ttb.1001@xxxxxx>     Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 9:12 PM
So instead of bringing us everything, bring us less, but stable. That said, I still have confidence in the team and I’m sure we will see something amazing in the (hopefully) near future.

Hire <hiretto@xxxxxx>      Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 7:00 PM
For me the solution is “simple”: improve fso, paroli, tichy and say “goodbye qtopia”. The actual stack, om2008.* sux. I find it absolutely not functional.

Instead, it will be cool to see SHR on freerunner because merged the power of new framework with the old stack ( 2007.4 ) that seems to be almost stable.

t m <ttb.1001@xxxxxx>     Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 5:45 PM
Would be nice to have one basic image with a focus on these issues. Even if it slowed down development. I guess developers also need a phone, don’t they?

Steve Mosher <steve@xxxxxx>     Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 12:19 AM
That’s not the Goal of 2008.x The design philosophy is to create something clean and simple and then let end users clutter it up to their hearts content

I measure success in terms of profitability. At the current volumes and the current cost of operations we are where we need to be. ramping to grandma volume is a careful process that does not happen overnight.

We actually like the fact that there are competing distros. The one unique thing we offer is the freedom to choose your distro and choose your carrier

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.

NOTE: The quoted texts are copyrighted by the original authors and therefore not covered by the licence this blog uses!

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