The recent post by Dario on the KDE Workspace Vision raised some concerns on why Brainstorm was not used. One commenter even said Right now it feels like “Throw an idea over a wall for no-one but end users to discuss until it bitrot’s”.
The Brainstorm section is indeed in need of help. To make it more useful, a couple of things are needed:
- Statistics to evaluate which ideas are best representative: it can’t be just the number of votes per se as there are things like confirmation bias or controversies that may inflate the numbers
- Integration with Bugzilla: a way to automatically (using XML-RPC) send the ideas flagged as representative to a bug report filed under “wishlist”.
As it stands, the current forum team has not the time to carry out these tasks. But perhaps someone from the community can. If you thought you could not contribute because KDE was all about C++ and not about web languages, this is your chance to contribute: if you have PHP /HTML/web knowledge and want to help, hop on the #kde-www IRC channel and we’ll be happy to help you.
>Integration with Bugzilla: a way to automatically (using XML-RPC) send the ideas flagged as representative to a bug report filed under “wishlist”.
Please please no! Whilst there are a few absolute gems on KDE Brainstorm an awful lot of.
– stupid/not thought out ideas
– plain obvious (“we should make KDE faster”)
– so ridiculously huge that it would involve changing so much of KDE that it’s not feasible to open as a simple “wishlist”.
– new app ideas.
Just because it has a lot of votes does not make it a good thing for bugzilla.
Developers should check KDE Brainstorm more often though. There are some occasional gems but these can just be opened by hand.
@David Edmundson
The first part about the stats is exactly to avoid such issues. We’ve been discussing this a lot internally in the past. In fact number of votes is not the statistic I had in mind, because of bias and skew.
I’ve some more suggestions for brainstorming.
1. there should be a visible list of all available tags on the brainstorming page
2. if you select such a tag it should only list the tagged threads of the brainstormin section (now it lists the threads of the whole forum).
3. this should be be also available if you have selected the “idea filter” or the status (“submitted”, “in progress” and so on).
4. if you list tagged wishes there should a possibility to show it as long list (in one page) just with the title of a thread + date, tag, and vote (I know you can still use the search function but this is not as simple as it should be for quick organizing tasks)
There were disscussions on brainstorming that old ideas get lost (because they are on page xxx). My suggestions should lead to the situation that developers and users can have a better overview of the given ideas. So they can handle the ideas quicklier. In summary, from my point of view brainstroming have to be just a little bit more like bugs.kde.org.
On the other side there have to be clear communications kde wide that brainstorming is the first place for posting (and looking for) feature wishes.
This leads me to another point. On the one hand I understand the idea that users can discuss independently about a feature with no impact of a core developer. On the other hand you got the feeling (like Bugsbane said): “Throw an idea over a wall for no-one but end users to discuss until it bitrot’s”. This is not very motivating for posting more ideas.
In the end I want to say that this are only my assumptions. They need to be discussed further.
To me, the main thing it needs is separation of goal and implementation, like what Ubuntu brainstorm ( http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com )does. That deals with the daft “Make kde better” type “ideas” that have no practical implementation associated.
As the maker of that original comment, I should also point out that what I said, was that it can *feel* that way. I didn’t mean it anywhere nearly as harsh as it sounds taken out of context here. I think it’s wonderful and amazing that the kde forum folks have managed to squeeze nice, ajaxy, attractive brainstorm functionality into the forums at all. It’s beautiful. It just *feels like* (and this may not be true at all) that it lacks developer attention.
One way may be to have people tag what project(s) the idea relates to and advertise an RSS feed for those projects at the bottom of each one.
The issue was already discussed among the forum team. As said in the post, it needs someone helping to make things better.
I think the problem lies much deeper than mentioned here. We need strategies to involve users – and we need decent tooling and moderation support. I hope we will find some time on the KDE Webpage Sprint in Berlin (which for some reasons disappeared from the sprints.kde.org webpage) to discuss these topics. I will be there and happy to adress this with tons of ideas in my mind… ;)