Symbian’s last council meetings were held the day before  the Symbian Japan Forum, on 15th January.  I asked each council chair to share their  impressions and the highlights of the council meetings. Here is the response for the Architecture council. I’ll be back with the Feature and Roadmap council report soon.

Daniel Rubio on the Architecture Council meeting:

If I didn’t know better I would imagine the Architecture council as a long table of white bearded wise men sitting behind an oil canvas representation of System Model… quite the contrary, the AC is a very dynamic, young, energetic team made up from eleven companies from the Symbian ecosystem, from Operators to OEMs, to IP Vendors and Silicon vendors, covering a very wide variety of different backgrounds and interests.

As a team, we look into the requests raised by the community; package creations, removals, compatibility breaks, public API lists, etc, etc… but the most gratifying request to date has been that of transferring package ownership or accepting new package owners. That is the case for Ixonos and Accenture, who will be taking ownership of Image/Video Editors and QEMU packages, respectively. This, in words expressed by all AC members, proves that

• the Symbian Foundation is fully operational,
• Symbian is alive,
• and that the genetic variations introduced by other companies sharing the direction of the platform ensures a sound evolution path.

That was one of the highlights of the meetings in Japan… well, that, and the other nine resolutions that got approved alongside, such as the Qt package creation.

As a team, we also have workshops where everyone, and I mean everyone, has a say into topics that we need to explore further, with an aim to evolve this Symbian platform and future-proofing it. These topics end up being discussed in great detail, prioritized, and if deemed strategic then a working group is setup to develop them fully. Cloud based file systems, making the platform run on cheaper HW, how to bring up the UI fast in new HW with minimal components… it’s a long list of very interesting topics.

This was the team’s fourth face to face meeting, we have grown into a very cohesive team, and we have had some additions along the way; from the original TI, Nokia, Samsung, STEricsson, Sony-Ericsson, AT&T, NTT-DoCoMo, Fujitsu and Broadcom we now also have ARM and QuIC.

It is very gratifying how every team member speaks on behalf of the community and the platform. Of course they also cover their own business interests, after all they are in the AC because there is a particular corporation that placed him there. But the truth is that as a the Council Chair, I don’t find it hard at all to bring the overall Foundation interests on top.

Come to think of it, the idea of an oil canvas System Model is not that bad… hmm, food for thought…

In the following video, shot at the Japan Forum, Daniel introduced the Architecture council to the audience