Some of the more observant people may have already seen my mail to meego-dev proposing a program for developer engagement, or one of the forum threads about it within the relevant communities I'm targeting with it. (and for those of you who haven't, you have now!).

I made the unfortunate mistake of advertising this proposal just before heading off to Oslo, so I wasn't able to do it justice on the mailing list or write about it here, so, it's probably time to stop, pause, and reflect a bit.

In the days after writing that, I have been approached by a few people pointing out various other good work in a similar vein to this, such as the MeeGo application developer site being spearheaded by Ronan, all of which is great news - it's nice to know that I'm not alone in thinking that we need comprehensive developer help networks set up sooner, rather than later. So the tutorials side of my proposal can probably largely be shifted under the application developer site.

Where does that leave me? I still think that my proposal has value to add - primarily: a human touch. I think that the majority of we hackers are at heart a social bunch (of antisocial individuals, ironically). We don't like answering machines, or being fobbed off with boilerplate answers, and when we have problems, we want to talk to someone about it, and that's where developer engagement can really help go the last mile. We have technical solutions to this (blogs, and whatnot) - but at heart, it's a social issue, and we need to make sure we're fostering and encouraging the right attitude of collaboration and community to help carry the load.

I still don't have the answers to how this is going to fit together, despite a lot of soul searching over my brief time in Oslo, but I hope to schedule an IRC meeting sometime within the next week or two with the energetic bunch of volunteers that I have already picked up to discuss priorities, options, and where we go from here.