keesj

Velocity, the rapidity of motion, describes the speed at which we move as community. It describes the speed at which we can make changes to the Maemo world. We need to understand a few things about velocity in the community in order to function properly.

Understanding more about maemo velocity. First of all velocity can be hard to measure. We want to measure the progress Maemo is making. You might think that it is easy enough to measure but it is not.It is NOT is the sum of all the work that is done (work doesn't mean progress). It is not the sum of all the progress that is done either as not all the progress results in Maemo moving. It is the intersection of the progress made(more on that in the next paragraph). What would be a good measure to measure our velocity? Thinking in terms of maemo 5.0 would be wrong as 5.0 without 3rd apps would be useless. I think that "new users / week" or "new developer / week" might be a good unit as it makes everybody happy( Nokia and US) .

Given an amount of people we have in the community we have a certain amount of available horse-power that we can spend moving Maemo to increase it's velocity. The problem is that velocity != horse-power. And certainly Until LinuxTag the amount of horse-power we had available was not changing that much. What did we do with that power? We tried to keep up that's all we where not able to move forwards and spread our wings. We are an eco system that works at a certain speed and there is not much you can do about that can we? Would it help to enter more bugs in the bugtracker? I don't think so.

So we had LinuxTag and now have Niels and Dave. I am very happy to see them so busy. They certainly make progress in the documentation and packaging area. They also surely will increase our velocity in the end. What is this post about then? Niels and Dave are doing stuff we really wanted for a long time. Can we keep up with them as community or must we help increase the velocity by doing different things? can we simply wait for new developers to come? I certainly have a hard time keeping up with then.

Maemo Community Velocity.

07/07/08

11:30:05 am Maemo Community Velocity.

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