I wanted to provide another update on how things are progressing with the setup of the Foundation. The business continues to take shape and we had a successful day with the first council meetings, being hosted here in London this week.
It is a diverse group of delegates. As you may know, any contributing member is qualified to be a part of a council and to provide direct input and guidance as to the evolution of the development and release work. We are now processing over a hundred additional membership applications, and our ranks will continue to grow.
It’s a great moment when you see companies like Adobe, MySpace, Fujitsu, Orange, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Broadcom, Sharp, and many others all step up and join our stakeholders in an open collection of forums that will ultimately decide the future of mobile software. I cannot wait to see what the working group participants and submissions start to look like, as virtually anyone can form such a group and submit proposals to our councils.
The input feeding machine
Also, we now have 3 board meetings under our belt, and the final list of Directors includes senior leadership from AT&T, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. Our dialog and focus is on the most strategic of levels, and I must say that the drive for enabling the Foundation to be a change agent in this industry remains strong.
LG has decided not to participate at the board level. As a result, we are in advanced discussions with other organizations to fill their board seat.
One of the beauties of our set-up, and a tribute to our unique model, is that it will continue to reflect the highest levels of strategic alignment between member companies. Over time, and as a sign of our ability to adapt to market conditions and needs, board and council composition is open to change.
The march goes on
Lastly, our new site, what will be the corner stone of our online presence, continues to improve. We are in beta, and have been signing up participants in the hundreds to help us further validate and improve the level of functionality. This will include open source code management, defect tracking, discussion forums, a complete wiki of information resources, hosted research projects, and many activities to help consumers understand the power of Symbian products and services. As soon as we can mature and refine this site a little bit more, we will launch it to the general public.
I’ll be able to reveal more news as we put more of the building blocks of the foundation in place, so stay tuned.
// Lee
Thanks for a update Lee.
I find it interesting to compare the information from this blog with what comes from the Google Mobile blog and the Google Open Source blog.
While this seems to be roughly equivalent to the Google Mobile Blog there doesn’t seem to be, as yet, an equivalent to the open source resource.
It is excellent to see the Foundation bringing in opinions and experience from the large number of member companies but I don’t feel a similar amount of effort has been spent (yet!) in publicly appealing to open source developers. Perhaps it is too early days.
I look forward to the Foundation creating the equivalent of the Google Summer of Code, Open Source Awards (or contributing to the existing one), Google Code (application development hosting), Open Source Jam (in-person discussions), Google Talks (on-line presentations), etc.
There’s no shortage of opportunity to engage with the open source community. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the Foundation makes it happen.
What do you think about LG not participating on that meeting? Do you think it is because of its successful LG Arena, that maybe they think they don’t need Symbian or something else..?
Anyway, what big improvements are expected to come out on those meetings?
Carlos Silva
http://NOKIA-BLOG.net
I think LG has made their intentions with Windows Mobile pretty clear, which is to take it further across their product portfolio. Furthermore, we continue to emphasize the need for full support of our efforts among stakeholders. This implies that there must be a strong level of strategic alignment, and an emphasis on contribution.
In the last board meeting we spent a lot of our time discussing concrete initiatives and support needed for aligning developer programs, improving tools, and shortening the path to the consumer channel. Also, we discussed and approved council seats to ensure that we had the right level of diversity and contribution in respective councils. Also, we held some good discussions on how to further diversify the board.
// Lee
Hi Lee
Are you also looking to replace Motorola on the board well as LG? What if you increase the members fee up from $1500, can this cover LG and Moto?