The Symbian Foundation’s technology Councils are the member-led bodies that govern the Symbian platform. A certain number of seats on the Councils become available each membership year, which runs from 1st April through 31st March. Any Symbian member company can nominate themselves for these seats on the Councils, and they can nominate themselves for more than one Council.
Symbian Blog: Articles by Lauren Sarno
Ideas.Symbian.Org: Making It Real
Dec 10th by Lauren Sarno
Exciting news: here’s the first idea up and through the Symbian idea contributor site.
As you can see from the leaderboard on ideas.symbian.org, the Clock Radio is currently the third Most Popular idea. The Symbian technology managers for multimedia applications and productivity (Effie Vraka and Terho Niemi, respectively) are looking for a company to develop or sponsor it.
When implemented, the Clock Radio will be distributed as part of the Symbian platform, and the company that develops it will be in line for major kudos.
The current idea is to create a combination Internet Radio alarm and FM Radio alarm that features a wake-up light (begins with a very soft glow 15 minutes before your wake-up time and increases in intensity) and wake-up radio volume (that starts very soft and gets louder).
A lot of this functionality is already available in the platform, across three software packages (Organizer: Sharad Upadhyay, FM Radio: Jyrki Hoisko, and Internet Radio: Gang Shen, all of Nokia). The clever developer would work with Effie, Terho and the package owners to create the full implementation.
Does this sound like you? If so, please be in touch.
From Ideas to Reality
Dec 9th by Lauren Sarno
If you haven’t spent any time yet on the Symbian Ideas site, ideas.symbian.org, I’d like to remind you what it’s for and encourage you to get involved. It takes only a few minutes to make a big difference – and it’s fun.
Ideas.symbian.org was set up to generate ideas about new mobile devices, new mobile applications and how to improve the Symbian Foundation. Anyone can post, comment and vote – we want your vision of the future.
With the current level of participation in the site, any idea that garners more than 30 votes will be reviewed by a domain expert with the aim of seeing it implemented. The threshold for an idea’s receiving a full review required will increase as more visitors use the site.
Pivotal to the effectiveness of Symbian Ideas is the process for making ideas into reality. Symbian doesn’t have development resources, so we’re devising means by which Symbian can help catalyse the implementation of popular ideas. In addition to the ideas whose implementation Symbian fosters, people or companies can choose to implement good ideas independently in order to make money from them. Read more »
Opportunities at MWC
Dec 8th by Lauren Sarno
According to a recent membership poll, 63 Symbian members will be attending Mobile World Congress 2010. Of these, 31 will have a booth, and an additional 16 will have a meeting room or pavilion.
Symbian Foundation will also be there. Our goal will be to promote the Symbian community. We’re planning a raft of activities that will help attendees discover members and their technologies.
Booth – We will use our booth to point attendees to member booths, display member presentations and feature their logos.
Media lounge – Press and bloggers will be there. If you are a member, what would you like them to hear about you? Send us your success stories and plan to spend time in the lounge.
Birds of a Feather sessions – We have conference room slots we’re opening to members for informal seminars about technologies, roadmaps, business issues – anything you want.
Party – Be part of the celebration of our first year as a successful community.
We need your help in promoting the community!
We will need volunteers to staff our activities. We can give away one free ticket to Mobile World Congress in return for 6-8 hours of volunteer time, and we’ll be giving kudos to volunteers in our press releases.
If you don’t have a booth, volunteer and be part of ours. While you’re on booth duty, you can promote your own products and services, as well as talk about the benefits of Symbian.
Along with volunteers, we will also need sponsorship for some of our activities. Sponsoring our media lounge or party will help increase your presence at the show.
If you’re interested in any of these opportunities, let me know.
Not Just About the Source Code
Dec 7th by Lauren Sarno
When people talk about contributing to Symbian, they’re usually talking about making improvements or enhancements to the source code. But when we hung out our shingle in April, it was our goal and plan that Symbian become member-led in every area, from platform governance right through to member services and events.
And it’s happening much more quickly than we thought. For those who haven’t met me, I’m Lauren Sarno, and I look after member activity at Symbian.
As a non-profit, open-source organization, it is critical that members seize the opportunity to raise their visibility and create an expanding world by offering to develop services that benefit the overall community. You will continue to see more and more of these on our sites.
A recent example, the Collaborative Test Database is in the spec phase right now. This database, accessed through a Web front end, is intended to reduce test duplication, and hence everyone’s costs. We envision a number of variations, such as multimedia playability and Bluetooth interoperability testing. The database will help identify the highest priority tests to be run, and enable users to contribute both test definitions and test time. All this driven by the community.
The site, of course, will appear with “Powered by [members]” at the bottom of each page, and test suites will be identified by contributor. You can find out more about this project on Martin Webb’s multimedia blog.
And it doesn’t end there, as proven by the first member-sponsored event in Bangalore. Members are now organizing events in Poland and Beijing, and more regions are lining up to create events in the new year.
Symbian is not the staff – it’s you. Members will be staffing the Symbian booth at Mobile World Congress (while promoting their own products and services) and sponsoring the Symbian party. Members will be holding Birds of a Feather in Symbian conference rooms and representing themselves in the Symbian Press Lounge.
Come join the fun! Why? Because it makes business sense. The members who are the most involved with Symbian are seeing the greatest increase in revenue from membership. Because if members aren’t making more money than they did when Symbian was proprietary, we should all just take down the shingle and go to the beach.
And I, for one, am way too young to sit in the sun for more than two weeks a year.
Bangalore members making it happen
Nov 6th by Lauren Sarno
On 12th October, Symbian members held our first joint member workshop/package owner training in Bangalore, followed by a glorious dinner at the Taj Vivanta hotel. Huge thanks to all the members who worked so hard to make the day a success, especially those I didn’t get a chance to thank personally.
I’ve visited Bangalore before, and every time, more massive office buildings have gone up and more companies have moved in. In Silicon Valley, when a company opens a branch office, 10 people camp out in a corner of a building. When a company opens in Bangalore, 300 people move in. It wasn’t a random choice to hold the first member workshop there – the place is humming with activity.
The most impressive, even inspiring, result of the Bangalore events was the realization that Symbian members are making our bold assertions about the Symbian community come true. Because Symbian is a small non-profit organization, in order for the community to thrive, we always knew that members would have to volunteer to become regional leaders, to take responsibility for their own events and form a strong network. Bangalore proved that it’s happening, and sooner than we expected.
Three member companies sponsored the day. Nokia sponsored the package owner training, with more than 35 package owners and commiters attending. Srikanth Raju of Nokia and Lars Kurth (head of the Symbian Contributor Community) were the organizers. The sessions were led by Lars, Terho Niemi (Symbian technology manager for Web and productivity applications) and Effie Vraka (Symbian technology manager for multimedia applications). I was off at the member workshop, so I can’t say much about the package owner training except that everyone was energized when they got to the dinner, talking a mile a minute.
Aricent sponsored the member workshop. Ten members attended from five companies, and I was extremely pleased that of the ten, nine were people I hadn’t met before. Maruti Chigadolli was the Aricent organizer, and everything went very smoothly – my thanks to everyone who pitched in to help Maruti. We talked about how to make the most of the marketing benefits of membership, brainstormed about what new member services would be valuable, and introduced the volunteer program – more about that coming soon.
Here we all are at our smiling best, because we’re just about to leave for dinner.
Since all the member programs in place or in development were requested by members, I can’t emphasize enough how important these events are. We are truly a member-led organization, and the companies that are most involved are seeing the greatest increase in business from membership.
Teleca sponsored the drinks reception and buffet dinner. When Edwin Moses, our host for the evening, first offered, I thought we were going to have a few drinks and nibbles. I was overwhelmed to discover that Teleca had planned a three-course sit-down meal at a five-star hotel. Vividh Baru of Teleca flew in for a few days to organize the event and take the Symbian team to dinner on the day we arrived. He was such a gracious host, he made it look easy, which I’m sure it wasn’t. Many thanks to his entire team.
From left to right, here’s Edwin talking with Effie Vraka (she’s the gorgeous blonde), me and Lars. In the background, you can see Jussi Lemponen of Tieto talking to Terho. So far this year, I’ve met Jussi in Finland on Towel Day, Bangalore at the member workshop, and London at SEE. On Towel Day, Jussi gave me some valuable guidance that has resulted in a number of programs, and it was good to be able to show him in Bangalore how his ideas were being implemented.
It’s happening. At the moment, we’re working with members in China, Poland and Silicon Valley to plan events, and members in France, Israel and the Scandinavian countries have expressed an interest. If you want to help make it happen in your region, let me know.
Services for the community, a program for members
Jul 23rd by Lauren Sarno
The first of the Web-based programs that are designed to create tangible value for Symbian members has been rolled out on the developer site. Quite neatly, it also serves the entire community.
Symbian offers support for developers through the Forums. However, if developers want more technical support, professional services or training, there is an impressive array of members that can help. These members are listed on the newly enhanced Services pages. When you go there, you’ll be offered the three categories (professional services, technical support, training), and sub-categories when you click on the links. Read more »
Who needs to be a member?
Jul 14th by Lauren Sarno
Roelof the wunderkind informed me that we passed 100 members late last week, and we stand at 107 today, so things are moving quickly. This was all pretty exciting for about ten minutes, until we asked ourselves the obvious follow-on question: Which members do we need next?
Members have pretty much been a self-selecting group so far. Now it’s time for us to start inviting companies we know will be valuable to the community and focusing on creating value for them. Read more »
…what you really, really want
Jun 19th by Lauren Sarno
Finally getting a handle on this job, which has changed quite a bit since the last time I blogged. Ably assisted by the nimble-brained and service-minded Roelof Kotze, he and I are now Membership. As anyone who has had a hitch in their membership process knows, Roelof is the Member and Community Support staff, who works to improve and automate our processes and handle applicant difficulties. He is also the person who answers info@symbian.org, and the human being at the other end of the online Contact Us form. If you want to give him a kick, send us a message and start with “Hey, Roelof”. Read more »
Someplace completely different
May 8th by Lauren Sarno
I was in my twenties when I first realized that other people don’t necessarily want to work with enthusiastic, motivated people, and some people are more interested in protecting their position than creating value for their company. Just from that statement, you can see what an insanely naive person I was.
I’m no longer quite so naive, but I retain a wistful hope when I start a new job that this will be the place where I’ll really feel at home, where contribution is valued, where colleagues welcome new ideas, and where people actually care about the way they treat each other. Read more »
