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I was thinking the other day about Brainstorm and upstream interaction. The fact is, lots of ideas belongs to upstream projects, so how should we help them to use these ideas?

Adding a new “software” field, and making something like [project_name].brainstorm.ubuntu.com would not require too much effort, but we can’t expect upstream projects to use one distro’s brainstorm website as their idea tracker.

So I had a crazy idea. What about a decentralized Brainstorm?

A Brainstorm website would be able to “connect” to another: both would have to validate the “connection”. Once the “connection” is established, the Brainstorm website would regularly update a given subset of its data from the other. New ideas would be downloaded. New votes would be added. Globally, data is synchronized: a same idea will have the same nb of votes, comments, on all Brainstorms.

Example: Let’s say we have the Firefox project Brainstorm, the Ubuntu Brainstorm and the Red Hat Brainstorm. The Firefox Brainstorm have quite some success, but quite a lot of Firefox-related ideas are voted/discussed on the others Brainstorm. Also, the firefox folks want the input of both average users (Ubuntu) and enterprise user (Red hat). (Eh, I know I’m oversimplifying things, right?) So the FF Brainstorm “connects” to the two others Brainstorm. The two distro Brainstorms download the current FF ideas, and display them. They get votes, comments. Then the FF Brainstorm regularly get the “results” from the distro Brainstorms and cumulate the results. The FF Brainstorm as well send its results to the others ones. In the end, the same idea on different Brainstorms are identical.

On the security side, you would keep the control of your Brainstorm website: you would only connect to others Brainstorm instances you trust.

Quite crazy idea, I agree. Lots of changes needed, I agree. I wonder if it’s worth the work involved. Anyone would be interested by this?