Ubuntu Brainstorm 8.10 Report

Table of Contents

This report is intended to give an overview of Ubuntu Brainstorm from its launch in February 2008 to the end of the Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 development cycle in October 2008. It was written by a Ubuntu Brainstorm administrator who is not employed by Canonical.

General overview

Users

imgs/UBusers.png

Ubuntu Brainstorm is counting 22,000 registered users. After a fast start, it is now steadily growing at a rate of 40 new users a day. 2,400 of them accessed Ubuntu Brainstorm in the last 15 days, 5,000 in the last two months.

Ideas

Almost 15,000 ideas have been submitted, and we are counting from 20 to 40 new ideas every day.

Idea quality

Unfortunately, a good half of submitted ideas are not well formed : they are either badly formed ideas (no clear or realistic rationale and solution), duplicates ideas, or non-ideas (bug report, packaging request). To clean ideas out, there is currently two processes : moderation by the moderation team, and the natural selection by votes.

  • The moderation help to filter bad ideas in two ways : they take care of the bug reports and packaging requests, and they process duplicate reports submitted by users. So far, 3437 ideas were marked as duplicate. But the moderation team as it is now is too small to handle everything.
  • The voting process helps a lot to naturally filter some of the bad ideas: duplicates, bug reports get buried and/or reported. Unfortunately, some abstract ideas with no solution attached, such as Idea #42: Speed Up Ubuntu-Gnome boot time (4770 votes) get widely voted.

In the end, the overall quality of ideas on Ubuntu Brainstorm is medium, and that makes the Ubuntu Brainstorm experience less interesting.

Idea vote repartition

imgs/UBideavote.png

The intervall of the number of votes of ideas goes from -760 votes to 6200. As you can see, a very few ideas cross the 400 votes gap : the voting system is efficiently selecting the most popular ideas.

Idea voting pattern

The usual voting pattern is: lots of positive or negative votes after submission (the most popular of the day usually get 50-100 votes the first day), and as time pass by, the closest to 0 the score, the less likely it will have new votes in the future. As such, popular ideas since day 1 are steadily growing and gains visibility while less popular ones are buried.

An interesting and unusual voting pattern occurs on ideas based on some hot latest news. In such ideas, the vote count is raising exponentially, especially when dugg on digg.com, and can possibily stop after some action addressing the idea. For example:

There are two interesting things here:

  • Ubuntu Brainstorm can be used to assess how unpopular a newly introduced feature/theme/... is during the development cycle of Ubuntu.
  • The developer comments on Ubuntu Brainstorm have a good visibility and have been quoted on some occasions to spread the word about the status of an idea.

Moderation and developer participation

Since the launch, Ubuntu developers, or moderators on behalf of the developers wrote 264 developers comments. 65 ideas are marked as in development, 18 are marked as implemented for Intrepid.

Developers comments are appreciated by users (Idea #14005: Brainstorm: warrant Ubuntu reply when an idea gets enough votes (264 votes), Idea #6259: Provide explanation of "Done" items in Brainstorm (588 votes), Idea #4717: Brainstorm blog (228 votes)). The developer blog posts after the release of Hardy Heron were also appreciated, according to the comments.

Votes

imgs/UBvotes.png

So far, around 1,300,000 votes have been cast. After a fast start, Ubuntu Brainstorm is now gathering an average of 2500 to 3000 votes every day.

Most popular user requests

Here is an attempt to catch some patterns of the user feedback in Ubuntu Brainstorm. Please note that this is far from exhaustive.

GUI configuration tools

One of the most commonly requested kind of feature is the development of some GUI configuration frontend. Users seems to be aware Ubuntu is very configurable from the command line, and want the same power from some easily accessible GUI tools.

Here is a few of them:

Artwork

The Ubuntu look and feel is a passionate subject amongst Ubuntu users.

Here is a few of them:

Entry barrier for developers too high

Pondered by the fact that a small fraction of visitors are developers, this area seems to be of big concern. The feeling is that the available development tools are quite difficult to get used to compared to others solutions out there.

Here is a few of them:

Smoother system update experience

This one is quite specific but quite widely asked.

Here is a few of them:

Simple popular requests

Going more specific, here is a small selection of the most popular ideas which includes a concrete and simple solution:

Popular feature requests needing work/discussion

Finally, a small selection of the most popular requests that would need much more discussion/work:

Impact of Ubuntu Brainstorm

Here is an attempt to evaluate the impact of Ubuntu Brainstorm since its launch.

More user participation in the feedback process

The metric is quite difficult to choose. Before Ubuntu Brainstorm was launched, if we were to choose the ubuntuforums.org idea pool as the main place for the average user to submit ideas, and the number of ideas as the metric, the number for the October 2007 to October 2008 would be 1000. Compared to the 15,000 ideas submitted to Ubuntu Brainstorm since February, this is quite an improvement.

Some projects are launched

The popularity and the hype around some ideas did motivate some people to start a project whose goal is to implement the idea. Two implemented projects were spot:
and one in development :

Impact on the Ubuntu development process

The feature planning period of Ubuntu is at the beginning of every development cycle, and Ubuntu Brainstorm was too young during the planning period of the Intrepid cycle back in April-May 2008. It remains to be seen its impact during the planning period of the Jaunty cycle.

What's next

In order to improve the quality of ideas and the Ubuntu Brainstorm experience, the following measures have been taken and will be shortly implemented:
  • Creation of an extended moderation team (25 people), with a easy process to become one of them.
  • New ideas will be reviewed by moderators before joining the main pool of ideas.
  • An idea will be separated into two sub-components, the rationale and the solution. There will be the possibility to propose more than one solution to an idea. This should force users to structure their ideas.
  • Reporting tools will allow users to help moderators spot ideas needing a change.

Summary

Ubuntu Brainstorm is gathering quite a good sample of average users who regularly post and vote, and the voting system succeed to highlight some of the most wanted features. Unfortunately, the average quality of the ideas is medium, making it sometimes difficult to actually extract something constructive, but things are planned to tackle that soon. The most popular ideas are mainly around GUI configuration tools, artwork, easier developer tools, and on the overall, there is the feeling developers comments on ideas are appreciated by users. Ubuntu Brainstorm has triggered the launch of some open source projects, and its impact on the Ubuntu development planning remains to be seen in the next cycle.

Date:2008-10-30
Version:1
Author:Nicolas Deschildre