Ubuntu Brainstorm 8.10 report
Intrepid is out, a new cycle begins… Time for planning!
I wrote a small document about Ubuntu Brainstorm trying to summarize what’s going on there (with a few stats), what you can expect from it, a summary of the most wanted features from its users, and its impact. I wrote this hoping to give to contributors and developers (not limited to Ubuntu) some clues of the most asked features out there, and what worries our users the most.
You can grab it here!
« Introducing the Ubuntu Wanted project
Community infrastructure : the newbie test »
Comments
Comment from gandalf
Time: November 2, 2008, 5:46 pm
Hi! Great document!
I’m working on some of the communities aspects in Mozilla project and I’m deeply interested in your brainstorm project.
quick feedback:
1) The problem with bad ideas is that they may be a great base for a good ones. If you think that those who shared their “bad” ideas would never contribute it in a “good” form than ability to efficiently block them could have negative impact on the good ideas.
2) You mentioned “unrealistic ideas” being voted high. If you think of b.u.o as a way to express people emotions about the project, their needs etc. then those unrealistic ideas are not that bad. They give you strong suggestion what people find most irritating etc. Of course, you have to apply wages (brainstorm users are not representative etc.), but it may be helpful to get a solid picture on what community is concerned about. It also may stimulate others to chunkify the “Big and Ugly Idea” into manageable pieces with scope, timeline and solutions.
3) In result I would argue about the experience being less interesting because of the medium quality. I find such projects as extremely efficient and valuable because of their creative chaos nature with huge variety of quality, impact, performance, “doableness” etc. I can read brainstorm and get a feeling on what’s up and some sparks of interesting topics and things that would never been discussed elsewhere (wall-light theme?) are landing there are energizing people to do mind work on that. Sometimes it may end up with something very productive, sometimes it wont, but I don’t think you have to quantitize the quality.
4) On the other hand, the expectations related to the popularity of an idea is potentially problematic. If you have an idea that has 9000 votes yet Ubuntu/Canonical is not working on it, will people consider it to be demotivating? Do they expect the most popular ideas to be implemented or do they understand that it’s not working like this?
5) And I think there’s some kind of perpetuum mobile in there. Most voted ideas are more exposed so they’ll forever get more votes than others.
6) Basing on the amount of people involved (I love the energy around it!) I think it would be pretty doable to ignite some brainstorm sanity sprints - one day per month spent when a group of insiders and outsiders gather together to find duplicates, cherry pick promising ideas that did not got enough publicity due to random bad luck (reported on holiday) etc. It could improve the quality of data while not removing the “bad” ideas which can still be valuable for those who brainstorm. (rule 1 of brainstorm: there are no stupid comments, anything can ignite a good concept)
Comment from Erik Andrén
Time: November 2, 2008, 6:12 pm
Nice writeup, would be nice to have a follow up post of this one after the release of jaunty to see if any of the ideas reached fruition.
Comment from Jacob Peddicord
Time: November 2, 2008, 6:36 pm
Nice stats. Looking forward to the update! 
Comment from RyanK
Time: November 2, 2008, 7:30 pm
Thanks for the report! Brainstorm really needs more work like this done on it so that the value that it produces can be best utilized and transferred. Any students out there that might want to base some research on Brainstorm?
Perhaps it would be useful for someone to interview the people behind liveUSB, GUFW, Ubuntu Wanted, etc and see how Brainstorm inspired or empowered them (and how it didn’t) and what tools or practises could make it easier for other people to start and finish projects.
Comment from nand
Time: November 2, 2008, 11:28 pm
Good to see this report interests some people!
@gandalf:
The problem with these bad abstract ideas with no solutions is that everyone will agree, but this will help no one. Plus the really interesting ideas visibility will be diminished.
E.g. yesterday a widely voted idea, #15115, is asking more speed, stability and polish. Of course I want that. Of course everyone wants that. But it does not help.
I agree it’s normal and even interesting to have a broad spectrum of idea quality with this tool, and I like to regularly read them. But the thing is: lots of people won’t bother to browse Brainstorm for hours to search good ideas : they want them as fast as possible.
That is why the noise, the bad ideas, has to be filtered out. That is why on the next Ubuntu Brainstorm, these ideas will be filtered out.
Concerning people expectations on popular non-implemented ideas, we have seen so far that a good explanation in a developer comment is welcomed by users. As long as there is actually some feedback, they seems ok with it.
Brainstorm sprints is a good idea… that need to be brainstormed a bit But this is indeed very interesting…
Comment from Zac
Time: November 3, 2008, 3:53 am
Interesting report. An excellant tool to improve Ubuntu.
Thanks.
Comment from gandalf
Time: November 3, 2008, 9:24 am
nand: yea, I can see your point.
So, I think we all agree that there is this specific kind of ideas characterized by:
1) Broad, impossible to implement
2) High demand, people are energized in this field, they may find this idea good or bad but they are interested in it
3) It could be quantitied into smaller ideas and worked from there.
When I was writing my notes I was actually thinking about maybe separating this kind of ideas.
In Bugzilla we use a term “metabug” for such broad topics that cover several chunks of implementable tickets, but they do a good job in bundling them into one, abstract, motivative, desired goal.
So maybe “meta idea”? Or to keep wording schema - “vision” that can have “ideas” attached to it as a kind of “blockers”? People could polish the vision/metaidea itself while others could work on specific chunks of it…
I don’t know, just a thought… maybe worth brainstorming? 
Comment from nasrullah
Time: November 3, 2008, 6:11 pm
I have upgraded to Kubuntu Hardy to Intrepid ibex it is very power and marvelous…waw it is great ,Windows Microsoft users are losing the ground …..long live ubuntu /Canonical and a big bravo to our esteem Ubuntu Leader mark Shuttleworth..
Comment from hamslaai
Time: November 3, 2008, 8:22 pm
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5805/
This idea go swamped with the erronious duplication system.
Comment from Vadim P.
Time: November 2, 2008, 4:17 pm
Good writeup.