The Stockholm airport to sponsor Ubuntu Brainstorm
Hey, nice catchy title, isn’t it? 
To be more precise, the LFV group, owner of the larger aiports in Sweden, is running in cooperation with two swedish universities, an airline ground handler and one IT consulting firm a project called “Airport Living Lab” (english on the second part). Quoting its mission:
By harnessing the concept of multi-organizational open innovation Stockholm-Arlanda Airport will multiply its pace of innovation by involving all airport stakeholders, such as passengers and personnel, into the innovation process.
And guess what they choose as a base for this open innovation project? As such, I am sponsored to work on the Ubuntu Brainstorm engine during this month before I start my new job, and two of their developers will join the project at least until October, date of the first public pilot. Concretely, that will mean some interesting new features, such as the rationale/solution separation, a reworked UI, idea filtering at submission, more powerful moderator tools,… that will reach Ubuntu Brainstorm *hopefully* in October or so. A developer snapshot is available here.
I also take this opportunity to introduce you IdeaTorrent, the name of the Ubuntu Brainstorm engine that was chosen after much cursing at TLD squatters! Thanks to this sponsoring, a release-neutral version is to be hopefully expected before the end of the year.
Well, some great stuff that boost your motivation on your open source project!
Introducing the Ubuntu Wanted project »
Comments
Comment from Scott Ritchie
Time: August 16, 2008, 8:44 am
One very important consideration to make before taking a system like this public is the voting system that’s used.
Currently, Brainstorm prefers ideas naively based on simple up votes minus down votes. A highly controversial yet somewhat popular idea with 10,000 down votes and 10,200 up votes gets rated twice as highly as an obviously good but boring idea with only 100 upvotes.
Using such a screwy system isn’t so bad for brainstorm on Ubuntu, as there’s not much expectation that developers will do anything with highly rated ideas other than look at them. I do worry that we miss out on some good uncontroversial ideas though, especially in the more esoteric parts of the Ubuntu system where people don’t feel knowledgeable enough to make an informed yes or no vote. A specific idea for making remote terminal administration of web server statistics easier, for instance, will be voted on much less often then a suggestion to change the default wallpaper.
Comment from melat0nin
Time: August 16, 2008, 10:13 am
Well done on getting sponsorship nand! Looks like IdeaTorrent is really taking off! 
Comment from Dean
Time: August 16, 2008, 7:17 pm
It seems interesting times are ahead for brainstorm. Congratulations Nicolas!
Comment from nand
Time: August 16, 2008, 8:55 pm
Thanks all
@ scott:
You’re right about the good ideas about very specific parts that can be missed due to not enough people affected by this parts.
If you’re looking for specific ideas, you can search for yourself “statistics server administration”.
But if you’re reading regularly the website to try to catch good ideas, with so much ideas out there, and so much different areas of interest, it’s difficult for the website to present all the popular ideas. Lots of filtering fields have been put to help it, though.
Now, I’m thinking about knowing more about our users.. if we knew that the user who voted this server idea was a sysadmin, make it worth 5… Could be interesting to brainstorm that.
Comment from troy_s
Time: August 17, 2008, 5:10 am
“Now, I’m thinking about knowing more about our users..”
This is exactly the direction any vote based scenario must move. Simple up / down voting will not suffice for design directions. In the end, this is all about audience. The more demographic data one can collect, the more useful the results.
“if we knew that the user who voted this server idea was a sysadmin, make it worth 5…”
Weighting is not good in any situation. Ultimately, everyone should be entitled to their singular weight of vote. The question here is essentially “What data should qualify an idea as being worthy of further attention?” To this end, I’d strongly suggest you collect demographic data and provide an extremely simple interface to examine the data. For example, boolean values with radio boxes and numerical values for ranges. This might allow you to examine say, 20-30 year olds who also work as system administrators in companies with greater than 10 computers. The results would be very useful and even worthy of a potential API to graph / chart / etc. from other applications.
What makes the front page? Is it something that has a great number of votes in a short period of time? Something that has general positive votes from within a given demographic? Perhaps even there is something to be seen in a most disliked area for a given demographic?
In the end, this should entirely be about audience in order to reveal useful information. Random audiences reveal random results under the guise of meaningful information.
Comment from James
Time: September 18, 2008, 1:17 am
Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.
Comment from DreadKnight
Time: August 16, 2008, 6:23 am
I really like it becoming project neutral. Perhaps when LaunchPad becomes open source it will get merged into it (or even earlier than that)
Keep up the good work!