Welcome

Steve Mosher steve at openmoko.com
Sun Apr 12 00:14:57 CEST 2009


  Let me share with you my initial cut at this process. Dr. N and I have 
been exchanging ideas for a short bit, and I also participate in two 
invitation only lists that are discussing the GTA03. I'd like to try to 
open up the whole process. With the exception of Dr. N ( and a couple 
others) everyone who posts on these lists has "implementitis" They each 
have a vision of the "perfect phone" They are all jumping to a solution 
when the problem  is ill posed. The question is not " what's the perfect 
phone?" the question is not "what should an open smart phone be" Those 
are not the questions. The question is this. What is the next phone that
Openmoko should build. or more generally what is the next Open 
source/open hardware phone that the community can build?. When you pose 
the question this way you impose realistic business constraints on the 
engineering and design process. You focus on defining the requirements 
up front, on setting cost targets, and price targets, and schedule 
targets. That is you get the product process right.

I tend to think top down. I believe Dr. N and I share that approach.
It's an approach I have used to build everything from jet aircraft
to Mp3 players. Our thought is to have a more organized process that the 
community can share in. As for OM involvement. I will donate as much 
time as I can and hopefully respond to all relevant mails on this list.
Keeping my inbox clean on a weekly if not daily basis.
If the activity here starts to show promise, I'll devote more time. I'll 
  volunteer to all the business planning or show others how to do it. ( 
its dead easy)

If people just want to have debates about resistive versus capacitive
or 3G versus no 3G, then I'll just reiterate that that approach is a 
broken process. As a marketing guy I'me used to having engineering ideas 
and products thrown over the wall. "hey steve, sell this!" Once in a 
while you actually get something compelling. usually I toss it back

As to your questions about funding. I'll spend some time coming up
With budgetary guidelines for Phone development. So that everyone
invloved can have an understanding of the scope of work involved.

  So things like: man months of labor, prototype costs, EVT costs,
  PVT costs, etc. ballpark figures. We may for example be able to
  make it through a prototype phase with dues and contributions.
  Don't know yet.





Gerald A wrote:
> Hi,
> I'll add my 2 cents (or thereabouts).
> 
> I think mailings lists are a great place to talk, describe, debate, and
> suggest. We can tweak ideas and bounce ideas around.
> 
> Since I have a wiki background, I think we should "be bold" and chat about
> whatever the next generation open phone should look like. In doing this,
> though, we should realize that different people have different visions of a
> "perfect" phone, and that OM might not have the exact same vision of a
> phone, and for different reasons.
> 
> It would be nice to know what kind of involvement OM is going to have. Is it
> going to be a quiet observer? Will it drive the process? Will they just drop
> by once a quarter, to mine the best ideas? Are they willing to fund some of
> the test fab for the hobbyists, so it can be pushed forward? Having some
> idea of these things would be good.
> 
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 6:04 AM, Lothar Behrens
> <lothar.behrens at lollisoft.de>wrote:
> 
>> Project planning software - who makes what at which time or day =>
>> there are propably web based solutions for it.
>>
>> If I think about this, I would expect the benefits of filtering out
>> ideas early, but have a short list of all these ideas on hold. Keep
>> technical concerns concentrated at one place, we know who will be
>> involved and when the tasks are planned for execution.
>>
>> That way a potential company could quickly participate by looking at a
>> short and concentrated idea/task/project board.
>>
>> Would this be a way to form the comunity to be successful?
>>
>> If not, how has www.amsat.org got this organized?
>>
>> We could also learn from them and ask for feedback :-)
>>
> 
> Wow, project planning? Sounds more like a cathedral then a bazaar. But maybe
> that's the way hardware has to be? I dunno, I'm a software guy. :)
> 
> I'm willing to put in some time and help push this forward. I think it's
> crucial that there be community involvement, I don't think OM has all of the
> resources to do this themselves. And, this means that we do get some bit of
> influence over the project. I mean, if we come up with a working hobby
> prototype, it'll be harder for them not to look at this seriously. :)
> 
> Gerald.
> 
> 
> 
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