The new interface resembles the IdeaTorrent sites, but it is still powered by the forum software (phpBB), a clear example of the flexibility of the platform. Posting new ideas, voting, commenting and filtering the lists is now extremely easy and requires just a few mouse clicks.

For those who have Javascript-enabled browsers, the KDE Brainstorm sports a complete AJAX interface. In case Javascript is not available, the interface gracefully degrades to a non-AJAX version, making it useful even for people who do not want to run Javascript in their browsers.

Aside from the new looks, the KDE Brainstorm keeps its strong foundations: the Idea Moderators, whose hard work is essential to pre-screen and approve the ideas, the KDE Community Forums staff to keep the system up and runing, and of course the KDE community.

Check out the new Brainstorm, and let us know what you think!

First of all, a few words of introduction. There are quite a number of ideas being posted on the KDE Brainstorm, and it would be nice to know how the initiative is faring, and important highlights, like what ideas are more popular, which are more controversial, etc. That is why the idea of a monthly digest was born (in a similar fashion as the fabolous Commit Digest). Our idea is to publish these digests monthly, providing the community (and perhaps even developers) with useful information about the state of the initiative.

Issue 1 – March 23th – April 25th, 2009

Statistics

Let’s start by taking a look at the initiative as a whole. 323 valid ideas have been submitted in the last month, an average of 10.77 ideas per day. Quite a nice result, overall, especially knowing that non-valid ideas have been rather low, on that regard. Specifically, the staff has reported 15 invalid ideas, 28 duplicate ideas, 33 which were actually already implemented, 3 that were not ideas (more like bugs), and two rejected ideas.

Of course, posting ideas is just the first step. The second is, basing on their vote count, to submit them to the developers. 22 of them have already been submitted, and we are awaiting feedback and comments. Three ideas have been already implemented. Specifically, the developers addressed the following ideas:

• Per-mimetype thumbnails in Dolphin
• Movable tabs in Dolphin like in Konqueror
• Extract menu in Ark when using drag and drop

In particular, the last one was the first Brainstorm idea to be implemented by a KDE developer. Many thanks to Harald Hvaal for this!

Getting noticed

This month, the top voted idea was Easy, Beautiful Progress Notification in the Task Bar (by forum user Kubuntiac), an idea to bring Plasma progress notifications in the task bar, complete with a couple of mockups which make the text very clear. Kubuntiac stresses that it would not replace the current system tray based one, but instead to have an extra indicator. The reception of the user community has been quite positive, as this idea has 62 votes at the time of writing. Coincidentally, this idea is also the most discussed one of the month (25 replies).

The community is heterogeneous, and some ideas are bound to be controversial. This month, the top controversial idea is Payment/donation to get bugs fixed (by forum user alberto.rossini) which although showing only 0 votes at the moment (result of opposing votes), has sparked quite a discussion about the impact (or lack thereof) of monetary donations to get bugs fixed for KDE. The community is clearly divided on this topic and the opinions are varied.

Speaking of getting noticed, forum user TheBlackCat is our idea submitter champion for this month. When Brainstorm was created, TheBlackCat ported over many ideas discussed earlier in the Discussion forum, and also proposed quite a number of ideas on diverse fields (mostly Dolphin related).

Status of the project

How is the Brainstorm faring this month? Has the initial enthusiasm faded out? The simplest way to look at it is by viewing the number of votes over the days, as shown by the followng graph:

This is a time series of number of ideas for each day of the month. As we can see, the data is a little “noisy”, because the number of ideas posted have been fluctuating depending on the user submissions. The dashed line is the median of the votes in the considered period. We can see one big drop at the start, which was in my opinion “expected” when the novelty effect wore out. With ups and downs, however, the stream of new ideas has been more or less constant. If you would like additional statistics, feel free to suggest them in the comments.

Credits

Credit were it’s due, of course. The following people have contributed a lot to make this possible:

• sayakb – Data gathering and various bits of PHP magic
• Mogger – Development of the controversial idea score

Feedback

Did you like this digest? You didn’t? Let us know so we can improve it!

There are still some issues here and there. We understand that right now you’re forced to take a look at each thread to see the votes, but our plugin guru sayakb is currently working into that: hopefully you’ll see votes next to threads very soon! Remember, your input is also important to improve Brainstorm, so make sure you let us know if you find a bug or have any request.

I’m satisfied, so far. It clearly shows that there was a need to request features (also shown by Aaron’s post on openFATE a while ago) without clogging up Bugzilla. In a while, we’ll make sure that the most voted features will get forwarded to the relevant developers. As I said on the Dot story, I’m hoping this can bring users and developers more close together, and build a better community.

Last but not least, thanks go to KDE itself for being awesome, to OhReally, bcooksley and neverendingo for administering the forum, to sayakb for design and plugin magic, tkoski for moderation and more PHP, to msoeken and the rest of the mentor group. It’s always a pleasure to work with you guys!

Got a creative idea? Hop over to the forums and tell the world about it!