03
Brainstorming as an open community
Filed Under (fedora) by Zoltan on 03-07-2010
Tagged Under : brainstorming, fedora, ideas, infra team, web, website
We’re promoting us as an wide open community, but currently I feel that we didn’t left so widely open the doors. Partially. What I really miss it, is an place, an website where our members could drop in problems, ideas, and to brainstorm out in open form what’s up next in relation of each question, or else. As I said, partially. You know why?
Because currently when we have problems, questions, ideas around Fedora – it’s mainly goes through the mailing list only, where NOT everybody is reading. Also – yeah, our infra team, and engineer team, and the other teams has it’s own tools, wiki sites, voting procedures, but I feel that’s far away that an open source community could achieve. In first round we said that we need marketing, and merchandising. I say, I think it’s time to have PR, and brainstorming sessions too targeting us, and feed(s)back our community or vice-versa. I mean pull inside into under one page all of our inputs, ideas, problems, questions – and manage it under one common site. Not just only in mailing list, or just an post here on Planet. Also I feel that permission rights (levels) for every question, (voting, and brainstorming, etc.) about the related question (suggestion or whatever discussions are) could be managed through one system. Implementing this will be not so easy, but not impossible, I think.
I have checked out how the others are doing this. Dell has an IdeaStorm site where they accepting ideas, problems, from everybody who registers on their site. They have an very good voting system, answering the questions, suggestions, and everybody could have an comment too. When an thing came in and Dell wants the community help, they are calling together an Storm Session, where everybody could put in about that theme their ideas. Else the site, just aggregates the ideas – and the development & leaders, maintainers implementing, answering, making feedbacks as they could, or need. I think similar system could be used not only packages suggestions, problem discussions, our releases, else to much-much more – and we could reach more widely our community.
But similar system has the Ubuntu community, but they are using that only for limited types of discussions: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/
What do you think, guys? Could we create an such community site?
Mandriva also have it, it was called ideas ( http://ideas.mandriva.com ), and from the experience I had monitoring it, and discussing with users, here is a few suggestions :
- there will be significant input which are a little bit useless. I feel a little bit shameful to have almost started a fortune file with some of them. So be prepared to feel that some suggestions are not worth the work ( and therefore, the whole system )
- you need to moderate them, and this will take time and ressources. Or else people will feel ignored and be angry. Input on the suggestion is important.
- you need to be clear about developers using it. I know that Ubuntu and Mandriva people read the various ideas, but some users think that “if they suggest and it is not implemented, that mean no one ever look the idea and so developers hate them”. So you need to communicate, something like a monthly report, etc.
- to be really inclusive, you have to be multi lingual. But then, this cause some trouble by itself. At Mandriva, we used to have a french and english site, but this was not a silver bullet, twice more to moderate, need to translate to do something.
- most users will want something simple ( and they would be right ), but from my point of view, you need to classify ideas and suggestions, kind like bugzilla, so there is some conflicts ith that regard. As a moderator, what I need is some way to mark ideas as read, to be able to search them ( full text index ). Being able to mark duplicate is imho a must-have too.
- do not put too much emphasis on vote, as this usually do not reflect much ( or worst, this reflect just a group priority, as we used to have 10 users voting in block for some bugs in order to have them fixed faster ). Consensus seeking is more important
Personnally, I think it would maybe be better to organise short brainstorming session than continuous one, but maybe it has this own problem.
In any case, that’s a good thing to take a look at this, I suggest to discuss with others people who are doing this. AFAIK, opensuse also have a similar system.
By the way, ubuntu use http://www.ideatorrent.org/, so you can test it quite quickly.
Hey misc!
Honestly I think it’s a completely pointless idea, I’m afraid. Why?
Ask yourself one simple question. Would anyone ever say ‘well, Fedora’s a great project, but there just aren’t enough ideas!’?
Nope. No F/OSS project on record, as far as I’m aware, has suffered terribly through lack of ideas. On the contrary, they generally have way more good ideas than they have time to implement. So taking time to create a project that does nothing but gather…ideas…is essentially an empty PR exercise.
I pretty much agree with Adam, such website will have too much noise so the developers will simply not follow it.
Also, you will have people campaigning for votes for their ideas (on blogs, forums, lists), getting large number of votes and using this as an argument, even if the idea is …not that good.
When I see suggestions for a brainstorm site I remember a funny example from Ubuntu (sorry, I am too lazy to search the URL right now): someone proposed to the Fedora Art Team do do the graphics for Ubuntu, because ours are so much better. And IIRC the proposal even had a few votes…
I think you’re right guys. I understand now that solution means too much hassle, and less effectiveness. For the first sight for me seemed to me useful, but yeah – thanks for enlightening.