ML for ubuntu+1

[Chris Warburton]

On Sat, 2007-08-18 at 23:25 +0300, Murat Gunes wrote:
> A release-independent idea pool section has been discussed a few times
> in the forums, and I too think it's a better idea than the existing
> structure, though not precisely for the reasons you cite. I'm part of
> the Forum Ambassadors team [1] and I keep a close eye on the Idea Pool
> section; we get lots of redundant ideas, even redundant with what's
> already been posted regarding the release in progress. Basically, the
> problem is that forum members in general don't have a habit of checking
> what's already been posted, and what's already in progress. 
> 
> A huge release-independent idea pool will increase people's reluctance
> to look for what's already been posted in the worst case, and won't make
> much difference in the best. The long term solution to that problem is
> to better educate new users about proper etiquette and on how to
> participate in the development process, and the short term one is to
> employ more moderators.
> 
> > A great system for this would probably be something along the lines of
> > Dell's Ideastorm, but integrating something like that with the existing
> > infrastructure would be difficult.
> 
> That too has been discussed [2] multiple times. For various reasons [3],
> I think it's not a very good idea.

I agree with the problems that such a system could cause if it was made
in an official-looking way. I was just trying to think of a way of
organising a massive idea pool so people could quickly see if their idea
had been proposed. The digg/ideastorm thought was just a quick thought
for a scalable system that wouldn't require masses of manual
administration, and to be honest I wasn't even thinking about it in a
vote-for-what-you-want way, I was just thinking that having popular
ideas at the top would prevent a lot of the duplication since these
ideas would be the ones prone to repetition and would be easy to spot by
people about to repeat them.

Trying to organise the IdeaPool page on the Wiki has made me realise
that arbitrary hierarchies aren't perfect (I know this from my own
filesystem, since I am pretty obsessive about organisation in my home
folder) and that crossovers are a problem (ie. a configuration tool like
network-manager could go in hardware or in desktop enhancements,
different people would look in different places). I enjoy trying to
solve problems like these mentally, that's where the Ideastorm thought
came from is all.

Thanks,
Chris