Goal: provide a mechanism for community to suggest ideas and evaluate community support of proposed ideas via voting.
Similar projects: brainstorm.ubuntu.com
At first stage idea gathering will be limited to Drupal.org project only, with possibility to add other projects if necessary.
Purpose
Tool aims to be a centralized place for all the brainstorming around improvements to Drupal.org. Currently idea/suggestions are scattered around various issue queues, groups, wiki pages etc, making it almost impossible to follow everything and see "big picture" of features in demand.
Tool will be able to show:
-
Ideas that have broad community support, which also:
a. have ready solutions provided by community (read - someone wrote the code already and it just needs deployment) (example - Documentation team changes to doc pages)
b. do not have ready solutions provided by community (read - everyone wants the feature but noone has time/wants to code). (example - "kill +1 comments" initiative, topic pages) Such ideas might attract people who want to contribute to d.o, but do not know where to start, or future d.o web dev team could possibly take care of them. -
Ideas which do not have broad community support.
Process
Logged in users (supposedly d.o users via Bakery) will have an ability to post Ideas.
Each idea will have:
- Project to which it's related (At first stage only 1 project - drupal.org)
- Title
- Description
- Related issues/ g.d.o posts
- Tags
- Status: Active, Closed as duplicate, In work, Needs deployment, Implemented etc.
- Comments
- Solutions - This will require separate discussion on will it be special type of comment, can people vote on solutions etc. (will post separate discussion later)
The simple process is to have ideas.drupal.org open for adding ideas and voting all the time.
Another suggestion is to keep it open for adding ideas and comments, but open for voting only for certain periods of time, when there is a need to get up-to-date opinion of community on the state of things.
When idea gets added to idea pool it has status "Active".
When number of people steps up to work on something - idea status changes to "In work" and information is provided in idea description about the coordinators of efforts, place where work is being done, how to get involved etc.
When the solution is ready, it is posted back to idea and status changes to "Needs deployment".
After solution was deployed on d.o - idea gets status "Implemented".
This tool will at any given time be able to give an overview of all the work being done by various community members on d.o improvements. It could be used by future d.o web dev team to help them set priorities when planning. Also it hopefully could make process of developing for d.o more transparent and attractive for prospective contributors as it will show that anyone can work on d.o improvements and that ready solutions do get deployed.
As a last note to this pretty long text, I am willing to build this site if idea has at least little support.
Comments
You've got my support. I was
You've got my support. I was talking to a few people about a very similar idea (also based on my experience with and the usefulness of brainstorm.ubuntu.com) around the time of DC Paris. At the time I didn't know how to move forward with it... Would be very happy to help if I can, primarily from the site building and theming direction.
Thanks! Glad to know.
Thanks! Glad to know.
Would it be worthwhile to
Would it be worthwhile to discuss with how other communities have implemented this and the ROI?
mmm
I was thinking along similar lines last week, and I think it's potentially a good idea, but could also go bad. I was envisaging something along the lines of the stackExchange system, where both ideas and potential solutions could get voted up/down.
Potential positives:
Potential drawbacks:
There's probably more, just some initial thoughts..
This is something I have been
This is something I have been looking at as well as Randy Fay and others like my colleague Simon (http://www.deeson.co.uk/online/blog/playing-drupal-burnout). I think finding ways to better empower and enthuse the community to solve things themselves can only be a good thing, and we should also consider how we can reward those that are the most helpful – maybe through a badge system and/or moderation level like StackExchange etc.
The issue of maintaining d.o is a big one, and I'd like to see creative solutions like this made systemic as a means of spreading the burden.
We're planning to implement this in Commons
It's definitely a good idea to provide functionality for calling out the best ideas. The plan is to build this for Commons (D6 then porting to D7). Here's the relevant issue: http://drupal.org/node/1392756. It'll mostly likely be built as a contrib module as well.
The idea is that Ideas are posted within groups (OG). So rather than building a separate site, it could be deployed to G.d.o.
I'm sure that additional help and testing with the actual module will be appreciated.
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http://about.me/lisarex
This sort of thing should not
This sort of thing should not be a separate site. When an idea transitions to implementation, it would be good to link issues back to the idea and the idea to issues. This is much harder to do well with separate site. And a site is a lot of work to maintain.
Also my thinking. Ideas are
Also my thinking.
Ideas are likely for the most part to be generated through discussions happening all over d.o, and will be shared spontaneously on relevant threads, as they are now, not curated into a nice site.
I reckon we need to find a way to better pick up on these across the whole of d.o, and be quicker at establishing community sentiment (voting is a good start). Most importantly we need to find ways to encourage more of the community to get involved to increase the actioning (not just suggesting) of all the great ideas, which is more of a general d.o problem and one that several people are looking hard at right now, e.g. http://drupal.org/node/1399056
I have some ideas to help encourage contribution and handling all of this that I'd like to raise in a core conversation at Denver should I be given the opportunity.
Thanks everyone for feedback!
Thanks everyone for feedback! I am not opposed to ideas living inside d.o instead of separate website also. Main question in this case - their place in d.o structure.
- Maybe it will be special content type, living somewhere near projects and issues.
- Maybe "feature requests" could be moved from issue queue to this new content type.
- Maybe projects maintainers could be able to turn on "ideation feature" if they like, and people then gain ability to post ideas for this project, vote for them etc.
- Maybe Prairie initiative will improve issue queue in such a way that this special content type won't be needed at all.
Just random thoughts.
As for ideas on g.d.o while it might be great for Commons, in the case of d.o I think ideas belong to d.o not g.d.o. The only case in which I see them being useful specially on g.d.o is if we take Initiative pages and transform them into Working groups on g.d.o - creating really efficient way to coordinate work on something (like initiative or module). In this case it might be useful to move ideas there from d.o.
Seeing that a lot of discussions should happen before idea about ideas (!) will take its final shape and possible overlap with other efforts, I decided to concentrate on another project for d.o for the time being. However will happily take part in further discussions.
So it looks like we have a
So it looks like we have a third party system to play with for now... webchick has setup http://drupal-association.ideascale.com . This all gets a bit meta but you can go and vote for this idea over there!