On Saturday 4th of July I attended the Open Tech conference at the University of London’s Student Union. This is a regular informal, low cost, one-day conference on different approaches to technology, democracy and community. I was representing the UK Open Rights Group but found plenty of time to discuss the Symbian Foundation with developers, politicals, pundits and plenty of other random people.
Pretty much everyone had already heard of the Foundation’s creation and is keen to see how they will fit in with the wider open source community. This is particularly the case with respect to Google who are already very well respected in that area, not the least for their regular Open Source Jam sessions in London.
On top of all this networking I also had time to catch a few panel sessions including a very good one by Phil Whitehouse (twitter) on “How to Build Developer Communities”. Phil’s talk (slides, blog post) was mostly centered around single person projects wanting to build up a group of contributors but a significant amount of what he said still holds true for Symbian:
- Survey after survey of open source developers has shown that by far the most common reason for wanting to get involved with open source is to “learn something new”
- The second most common reason is “to teach others”
- After that comes “feeling like I’m building something cool” and “helping other people”
- It’s crucial to help developers who have common interests find each other (perhaps via an almost Facebook-like interface)
- Phil stated that it was “an opportunity to be creative – as opposed to your day-job” but since this is their day job for Symbian founding company developers it’s a great chance for them to be creative too
- Remember – everyone has an opinion and in open source is used to being able to say it. Top-down structures like the various Foundation Councils may provide a solid framework but they need to be flexible enough to listen
- There are huge differences between building a new community from scratch and open sourcing an existing product staffed by developers who might be a bit set in their ways – just concentrate on how their roles will change over time
- Most important recommendation of all was – Stay Cool – and think about exactly how much control over your project (or Package) you are willing to cede to others
This was my first “technology and community” conference but definitely won’t be my last so I look forward to chatting to people about how Symbian is progressing for some time to come!
David Durant (Nokia)
5 Comments
NO EDUROAM – NO NOKIA…
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=98362
thank you.
Hello,
I am posting here to say that are many developers are moving away from Symbian which makes me sad because I used to love Symbian application so much especially for S60 v2 . I don’t know what happened to Symbian year. It was the most advanced OS but it has not evolved in about 5 years . For example, the built-in email client is dust old, you cannot view html native on screen unlike other os mobile which are already available . Call log issue which has not been fixed since s60 v3 fp1 , here is what i mean
http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/discussions/board/message?board.id=smartphones&message.id=131369
and many others, but for me these 2 are driving me crazy. Additionally , Symbian s60 v3 is running on old hardware which has been used for the last 4 years . Take a look at Android(HTc Hero, Rachel UI, etc)and Iphone hardware , omap 34xx with GPU and we have not seen any s60 running that except for Omina HD and Satio, however, I have not seen any Omina HD in the market except in Italy and UK. I am not trying to bashing here but I am just afraid that I am losing the love of Symbian and moving to other mobile os which shortly I am already moving . Developers are also moving , take a look at
http://www.pixelsbeatpaper.co.uk/
pixelsbeatpaper developed many applications for Symbian s60 5th maps,
Shuffleshock (Pong)
MacAttack (Hit fling apple signs – not great)
Tic Tac Toe
Countdown Clock
Flip Clock
Sadly they have moved to develop application for iphone 3gs and forgot about symbian . I really hope I get response from for Symbian foundation workers about discussing these issues.
Hi Saad Naji,
In my view, there’s been plenty of advances in the last 5 years, including graphics, networking, multimedia, location services, real-time performance, and so on. You’ve pointed out a couple of places where the software has not advanced (in the ways you would like) over that time. That’s not the same thing as saying there’s been no advances.
One important reason for making the source code open source is in order to substantially increase the number of people who can work on the code and improve it – by, for example, enabling this kind of additional feature.
Again, with wider distribution of the source code, I expect to see many innovative third party modifications to the applications. See here for some more examples.
I expect that many developers will soon “remember” Symbian again
// David W.
hi
i am looking for MOble Guardian for nokia 5130XpressMusic edition
pls hlep me
>i am looking for MOble Guardian…
Can you be more specific? A quick online search shows there are around five different things that “Mobile Guardian” could mean.