Call for more developer feedback on Brainstorm

[Jorge O. Castro]

Ubuntu Developers,

In the interest of making the Ubuntu Brainstorm site[1] more of a
two-way conversation instead of a black hole of ideas I have been
asked to collect and publish developer feedback to ideas on brainstorm
itself. Some of you were asked to write a response to ideas prior to
UDS. I have been slowly publishing these responses on the Brainstorm
blog[2].

For example, Bryce's response[3] to an X idea was very detailed, and
as you can see by the comments, users appreciate this kind of
communication. Note that we don't expect every answer to be so
detailed and verbose, Bryce is an overachiever. :) So in order to
expand this feedback I would like to ask you to find time to do this
once a week while you're waiting for things to build or whatever:

1) Let nand or stgraber know that you're a developer and looking to
answer questions on brainstorm so they can set your permissions.
2) Once a week search Brainstorm for something you work on, like
"hal", "compiz", or "rhythmbox" or something. Brainstorm will
automatically sort the results based on the number of votes the idea
received.
3) Pick the top 3 ideas
4) Use the developer comments field to write response, then mark the
status of the idea appropriately.

If your response is going to be long and detailed, please just mail it
to me, and tell me what idea you're responding to and I'll put it on
the blog. More tips/ideas:

 * If you can't be bothered to make a QA blog account just mail me
directly and I'll paste it in the blog and the idea itself.
 * Brainstorm is real-time, If you find yourself answering the same
question on IRC over and over, find the issue in brainstorm and answer
it there, in one place. (This is a great way to curb the "when will
firefox final be in hardy" type questions)
 * Every team has new volunteers that might not know how to code but
still want to help, have them help you triage brainstorm ideas for
you!
 * Concentrate on ideas with lots of votes, there are so many that you
won't get to them all, let the voting do it's work.
 * Ideally, responding to an idea is the point, even if the answer is
"Nice idea, but sorry, we won't do this because of foo and bar".
 * If you're one of those insane people that read every changelog for
every upload and answer a bunch of mailing lists and forum entries
from users and you want to help me hunt down developers and answer
ideas, then please mail me.
 * During the early points in the cycle you should make an effort to
discuss at least the top few ideas that might affect your team during
a team meeting.

Any other thoughts or ideas?

-- 
Jorge Castro
jorge (at) ubuntu.com
External Project Developer Relations
Canonical Ltd.

[1] - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com
[2] - http://blog.qa.ubuntu.com/
[3] - http://blog.qa.ubuntu.com/node/9