The maemo.org logo contest that is going on — like others, I received four email messages about it — got me thinking: How do you express the ideas of a community in a name and in a logo?

Actually, I mean both “the idea of a community” and “the ideas” of that community when I think about this.

It’s easier when the name helps bind you together — I belong to a group called FAMCAM - Families with Cambodian Children and you can tell immediately who wants to belong to this group and why.

Maemo is a made-up word and people encountering it form the meaning by what they learn from the encounter. Well, it’s good that a branding process is going on since what exactly Maemo represented hasn’t always been so clear — the OS on the Nokia Internet Tablets, the development kit enabling software for NITs to be developed on a desktop, a Linux distro that had a Hildon UI overlay to make things run smoothly on a NIT, the software side of the Nokia effort, the open-source side of the NITS, the collective effort spurred by Nokia but encompassing individual FOSS developers, something somewhere in this is what has been meant by “Maemo” over this time.

Now, “Maemo with a capital M” is being identified as an “open source software platform for mobile devices. Developed by Nokia in collaboration with the Maemo community and some of the best open source upstream projects.” The Maemo platform is distinguished from the Maemo SDK and is manifested in numbered Maemo releases. Maemo Software refers not to applications compatible with Maemo but instead to the team at Nokia that’s responsible for developing the platform, SDK and some of those apps.

And the other apps for Maemo? Well, they come from the Maemo community, of course. And if ever there are going to be any “devices running Maemo” other than those released by Nokia, then the line between Nokia’s supportive actions and the community will need to be clearly demarcated.

And that demarcation is in process now. The logo contest for maemo.org is one step in separating Nokia’s own use of Maemo from others’. Now maemo.org will be an expression of the community and not of the Nokia team. Or something like that.

Hence my logo design:

Maemo.org isn’t a company and even the “dot org” is an honorific rather than recognition that a real organization has existed. But as a community, it represents the group of people who all contribute toward the same goal. So in my interpretation of the maemo.org logo, you don’t get machined results or perfect alignment. Yet it’s precisely this non-automaton, non-corporate approach that is the essence of Linux and the FOSS movement and which accounts for its vibrancy.

You can see other expressions of the maemo.org community as a logo at the contest submissions page at wiki.maemo.org.