Dawn Foster chosen to head up community management for MeeGo, the joint Intel and Nokia open source mobile platform

You may remember some news last week that Intel had agreed to partner with Nokia to merge their two Linux-based open source mobile platforms—Moblin and Maemo, respectively—in the hopes of combining their efforts instead of working in parallel. The project was dubbed MeeGo. And I was intrigued. It’s kind of a startup of sorts. And it’s definitely open source-y. And mobile. And part of the Mobilin team is here in the Portland area. So it seemed like something I should follow.

But one of the consistent comments I heard about the deal? “They’re going to need a strong developer community.” Yeah, you think?

Well, today the MeeGo folks made a decided step forward to address that problem. Dawn Foster—known to our community for her work with Legion of Tech, BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland, Shizzow, and all around community management—will be joining Intel as the MeeGo Community Manager.

For Dawn, going to work for Intel on the MeeGo project is a homecoming of sorts.

This is my second tour at Intel; I first worked at Intel from 2000 – 2006. At that time, I had never worked for a company with less than 20,000 employees. All of my work experience was in large corporations, but I had no startup experience. I left Intel specifically to spend a few years working in much smaller startups and to focus on roles where I would be building online communities. I worked in 2 startups, including Jive Software where I built and managed the Jivespace developer community. When I joined Jive, there were only 50 employees, and a year later when there were nearly 150 people, it started to feel less like a startup. At that point, I decided that it was time for me to break out on my own to do freelance consulting, which was something I had been wanting to do for a while. Freelancing was another first for me, since I had never owned my own business or done any outside consulting.

Now, Dawn will be taking the startup community management knowledge she’s gained and will be applying it to a much larger project, one that has the potential to change the way we access and use mobile devices in the future. Especially given the clout of the two hardware companies joining forces to foster the project.

That’s going to be exciting to see. Because if anyone can help form the community that will make this happen, she can.

And given the project includes Portland, mobile, open source, and startup—albeit internal—you can be sure that I’ll be keeping an eye on her progress and reporting back on what’s happening as MeeGo begins to take form.

Congratulations to Dawn, to Intel, and to MeeGo. I can’t wait to see where this goes from here.

For more information on the move, read Dawn’s post about joining the MeeGo team. For more on the Linux-based open source mobile platform, visit MeeGo.

(Image courtesy Aaron Hockley. Used under Creative Commons.)

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy