How does well does this community work?

[Vasco Névoa]

That's a though question, especially due to the differences between a 
car and a phone. :)
When it comes to pure Community building, IMHO the leaders seem to be 
Ubuntu; so you should probably talk to Jono Bacon or read his book. ;)
Regarding the Openmoko community, I think it works better now that we 
don't expect anything from Openmoko the company -- this has freed 
everybody to assert their own targets and roads, and get down and dirty 
instead of waiting for the next disclosure. So, not having a "benevolent 
dictator" over the community makes it proliferate and flourish. On the 
other hand, we now have almost as many distributions as we have phones 
out there. ;) And many of the applications are being redundantly 
developed in parallel, instead of collaboration.
So, my humble advice to you: if 40fires wants a coherent community, 
focused on a small set of defined goals, you must be the benevolent 
dictator and you must have a single communication channel that is 
extremely clear (see linux or perl); if on the contrary, you seek 
variety, chaotic innovation, and surprise, then just throw it up on as 
many channels as you like and watch the feeding frenzy. :)

BTW, congratulations on the project. The world needs it.

Roland Whitehead escreveu:
> I am working with the 40 Fires Foundation [http://www.40fires.org] to  
> try to build a framework for the development of open source hardware.  
> You might have heard that the first project is the "hyrban" car - a  
> car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell - the prototype of which was  
> revealed by Riversimple [http://www.riversimple.com] earlier in the  
> summer and whose designs have been licensed to 40 Fires. We have had  
> input from Mozilla and other software foundations but of course the  
> design of something like a car is a little harder to manage as an open  
> source project. Openmoko.org is frequently raised in discussions and  
> has lead me to push forward a wiki, mailing list and nabble based  
> forums. Before we commit to this, how well do you think that this  
> technology serves the Openmoko community? If you had the chance to  
> build a community for the development of the Openmoko (hardware as  
> well as software) what would you do and why?
>
> TIA
>
> Roland
>