meego.next();

Henri wrote a really nice blog entry yesterday entitled "Where is the future for openness in mobile?".  What he wrote spoke me quite deeply: as do may in our community, I deeply believe in the need for a truly open device stack.

As developers, we need it to be able to create on our terms.

As companies working in this space, we need the ability to innovate on our terms in a collaborative environment without creating dead-end separate silos. It simply makes the most business sense for us. (Though, admitedly, perhaps not for, say, Google ;)

As users, we need our technologies to enable freedom, not quietly rob us of it while we play Angry Birds.

To accomplish that goal we must have a community infrastructure that mirrors the end goals deeply. This is why previous efforts to do this have failed, in my opinion: while there was the stated desire (and probably real desire as well) to create something open, the path there was driven by engines that were most comfortable with closed systems and top down control.

While I was in Tampere, Finland last week I had the opportunity to meet with a diverse group of people from the MeeGo community: companies, their employees, volunteer developers, hardware hackers ... and they kept saying these same things in their own words.

Plasma Active, which is a mere five days away from its first release, has had such openness and collaboration as one of its two core principles from day one. (The other core principle has been to make beautiful things which add to and support your experiences in life; we believe this to be an important ingredient in making objects of desire and is the inspiration for Activities.)  So when we watched the events around MeeGo and Tizen unfold, it just reinforced in us all that we felt about other options out there: if we want an open platform, we're going to have to make it.

The question, of course, is who is "we"?

There is a large and vibrant community of driven, intelligent and experience people and companies that had gathered around MeeGo. As Henri's blog entry noted, there is a forward migration to Mer as an open, collaboration-driven platform. We'd like to support that.

We also feel, however, that some of the necessary parts won't magically occur on their own. That includes purposeful vision, clear goals, community growth and interfaces for interested companies. In addition, we'd like to bring our open UX work, along with that of others doing similar things, to the forefront here. So where do we begin?


To help determine that, we've scheduled to meetings over the next two days in #mer on irc.freenode.net. The first will be tomorrow (Wednesday) at 13:00 UTC and the second on Thursday at 18:00 UTC. Hopefully if you can't make the first, you can make the second one. Individuals and companies around Plasma Active will be there to start the process of discovering how we can integrate our efforts and foster the community processes around it that will lead to success. We announced the meetings with an open invitation on the meego-dev, meego-community and active mailing lists today.


I hope to see all the MeeGo-heads and Mer-folk (I had to say it ... ;) there so we can get to the business of building significant momentum together.