Many of you know that KDE Brainstorm ideas aren’t posted straight away: they are always pre-screened to avoid repetitions, features that cannot be implemented technically, violations of the Code of Conduct, and so on. This is possible thanks to the work of the Idea Moderators, that patrol Brainstorm and evaluate the new ideas being posted.
Recently, a few of them got too busy and thus we’re experiencing a backlog of ideas staying in the Vault (the staging area for evaluation) for longer times than usual. The existing staff is already quite busy, so despite the efforts some deficencies still remain.
Of course, there is a solution: more Idea Moderators. And that’s where you can step in. It’s not a particularly difficult task, you have to read the new ideas being posted and see if they comply with the requirements and the Brainstorm rules, and flag them appropriately (approved, won’t fix, duplicate…). It’s kind of a triager’s job, only with wishlists. Knowledge of what’s going on in the KDE community (e.g., reading the Planet) helps, but it’s not required.
It’s a task that doesn’t require any kind of coding and not a lot of time, just dedication. If you are interested, leave a PM on the forum to the administrators (me, neverendingo, bcooksley and Hans) or ask on IRC (#kde-www).
Speaking of Brainstorm, I and Hans have decided to categorize the current ideas, to see which ones are most sought. Counting votes and what not has issues due to size bias, so in the end we settled for reddit’s algorithm. Ben Cooksley was kind enough to point me to the queries I needed to run on the database to grab the information. Without much ado, here’s the top ten list (after weeding out invalid, duplicates, etc.):
- Plasmoid Calendar: Calendar events view and edit
- Improve consistency in System Settings
- KDE Theme Editor
- KMail notification popup should be more informational
- Improve KDE Help Center
- Jabber video support
- External subtitles support in KMPlayer or Dragon Player
- File Emblems
- Synchronizations of settings between two KDE4 installation
- Save/Restore desktop settings
Something I’m curious about, how much of these idea’s get implemented into KDE? There are some really good idea’s in there, e.g. making the theme modules consistent in KDE.
How is that gap being closed? I worry a bit that the developers go their own way to come up with new feature idea’s, while they could find much inspiration there! :)
Here are some numbers of idea’s being addressed.
88 Currently in development
153 Done
201 Submitted as bugs
And the current amount of open idea’s is 2198.
@diederik: there has been a number of them implemented, right? There is the ‘Done’ page which has over 150 implemented ideas in it – I think that’s an impressive number. Esp if you see there are only 88 ideas in development and 20 waiting for a moderator – it’s not like there are 1000′s of ideas and only a few get implemented!
Diederick, I agree, we developers need to be looking to co-ordinate more with the Brainstorm team. Some devs do a very good job, but I’d like to see more emphasis given at the start of each development cycle to setting the development goals and promoting the most popular ideas as being goals to work towards in a release.
Looking at the list, at least half are well known and well agreed improvements we’ve needed for quite some time, yet we seem unable to organise ourselves enough to just get them done. The traditional KDE way is just to let people scratch their itch and hope it all come together in the end. Gnome seems a lot more successful at organising their devs into working on such goals, although they have traditionally had a more centralised control. I don’t know what the solution is, maybe it’s having more paid developers, maybe it’s just our project leaders becoming slightly more the benevolent dictators and set goals for each release, maybe it’s just making a lot more noise around what the most popular requests are each dev cycle. Perhaps it is time to have a KDE Architects team to try give more focus and direction to our efforts.
Now, perhaps I should go update my design for Brainstorm #1, seeing as I’m semi-responsible for that area :-)
@Diederik:
Good questions, I’ll try answer “How is that gap being closed?”
1. Traditionally the good ideas (chosen from a set of criteria) would be submitted to http://bugs.kde.org, you can find them in the “Submitted” subforum. The idea was that ideas would be discussed and “mature” in Brainstorm. Well received ideas would then be submitted to the developers. The biggest problem with this is that it’s (currently) a manual process, and we lack the manpower to submit the many good ideas in Brainstorm.
2. We had a Brainstorm Digest, similar to the Commit-Digest, to highlight the most popular ideas, see e.g. http://www.dennogumi.org/2009/09/kde-brainstorm-monthly-digest-issue-3. Unfortunately there’s again a lack of manpower here.
3. Some developers check Brainstorm regularly for ideas. The KWin developers are for example very good at using the forums (http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/03/changing-the-feature-request-workflow-for-kwin/). You can search Brainstorm for specific words and tags and also set up a custom RSS feed for it.
It would help tremendously if more developers checked Brainstorm from time to time and commented on ideas related to their projects. If you get a developer account at the forums (just ask the admins), you can moderate posts in Brainstorm and for example mark ideas as Done or Won’t Fix.
Why not link a possibility to donate to KDE for each idea envisaged. Bounties could be a way to get it done more quickly.