/home/nand

Facts:

• Brainstorm is full of ideas
• There are not enough contributors for all these ideas.
• There are lots of potential and interested contributors that does not know how to start (that’s the hardest step, remember when you started!). We can see that for example in this idea.

Question: How to take advantage of Brainstorm popularity and idea pool to involve new contributors?

Current suggestions:

• Using the new Brainstorm blog to demystify the Ubuntu processes to the newcomers, and guide them. => Another entry point for potential contributors.
• Mentoring of small ideas, à la google summer of code, but with smaller tasks, no retribution and a smaller cycle.
• Spec writing sessions.

Any other suggestions?

Apple claimed the new Gnome Cheese is infringing a Apple patent concerning image editing, acquisition, and viewing. ?!. The author was asked to remove the code within 5 days. !!. Apple, WTF??

http://home.cs.tum.edu/~siegel/news/2008_04_01-bye_bye_cheese

Will this crazy and dumb all-patenting system ever end??

[Edit: of course, there is a chance of an April fools joke. Pretty tasteless if this is the case… ]

[Edit2: This *was* a joke of a really bad taste. ]

The ideas keeps coming… And soon we will be able to give some feedback! A blog will come soon. Meanwhile, here are some appetizers:

• New status for ideas: “Already implemented” and “Blueprint approved”. The former will be useful to separate new cutting edge ideas just being implemented from the rest, while the latter will allow us to introduce the important role of the blueprint.
• New field for the ideas: “target release”. That will be useful to set a target for ideas in progress, and to set the initial availability of implemented ideas.
• The “Random ideas” list does not show anymore the ideas you have already voted for/against, neither the implemented ideas. Useful for the hardcore voters (Yeah, I did see one user who has voted almost every idea!)
• Display a clear message on the idea page for every non-new idea, so that the status of the idea is pretty clear.
• Removed the idea menu, barely noticeable, and added tabs. I hope the image links will be more noticeable then.
• Modify “most popular week/month” pages so that ideas no older than one day are not shown. This will give a chance to older ideas to stand up amongst the newer ones.
• Disable the ability of the bug/spec status to influence the idea status. Three reasons:
  • Users were sometimes putting bad entries, and were complaining at the wrong status.
  • Hard to maintain code.
  • 33% increase of SQL processing.

Finally, the stats of the week: 22,000 comments, 600,000 votes, 13,600 users, 5,600 ideas (1171 dups, 340 deleted), 2300 dup reports

Wanna install Ubuntu Brainstorm on your computer? Wanna see the code, and maybe contribute back? Great! Here are the instructions!

Don’t forget : if you want to contribute, don’t do it blindly, coordinate with us first!

I slowed down a bit this week end, I do not want to experience a burnout again! So the changelog is quite short:

• Dramatically improve responsiveness when displaying ideas lists: Locally, the SQL is now processed in 300ms instead of 5000ms. I discovered that subqueries are *bad*.
• Ideas in the “Implemented ideas” and “Ideas being worked upon” list are now displayed by date of status change. That means that the most recent ideas that are marked as “Done” will be displayed first.
• Some work on stats, but nothing visible yet.

Expect this during the beginning of the week.

Stats of the week: 500,000 votes, 12700 users, 4600 ideas (in which we can find 300 deleted and 800 dups), and 1700 dup reports.

In my opinion, as a developer, listening once in a while to user input should be almost mandatory. It brings us back to Earth and reconnects us to the expectations of our users. It also gives us a glimpse of how they experience our work, something that as developers, we can’t sense. And that’s gold.

Ok wait, I know the drill, we are in the FOSS world, where the developers only do what they care/want to do. Right. We are already full of ideas, no need for more, and we don’t have time. Right. But still I would urge any developer who actually wants a successful software, to listen to their users once in a while. You’ll be astonished at how your view and their view of your work is different. (Hey, I say “listen to”, I do not say “do as they tell you”!)

But users are not giving their feedback for free : they want a counterpart. They want updates, they want to know what’s going on. That’s a fact, and that was with that in mind that the website was designed (Status on ideas, developer comment area). But reading some ideas, I’m amazed at how much some of them actually want back : Show where and when the Brainstorm idea has/will be implemented, Change the idea’ status when a Brainstorm administrator has read it,…

A nice “idea” to finish

This time the focus was on duplicates prevention. Here’s the menu:

• Automatic AJAX search for duplicates when submitting a new idea.
• Listing of all the duplicates of an idea, and a link to the “report dup” page, on the idea page.
• Users can now see the ideas they have demoted/promoted.
• A new front page ordering that shall avoid vote hijacking of big duplicates. For now it seems to behave not so well on the week and month page, maybe reverting on these lists.
• A new category, Security.

Enjoy!

Because everybody like stats (and because it’s not implemented yet!), here are some numbers for you, concerning the week of the launch (28th feb - 5th march):

• 10796 users
• 338319 votes cast! (that’s around 31 votes per user)
  • 238043 were +1 votes
  • 100275 were -1 votes
• 10446 comments posted on ideas!
• 3145 ideas
  • 326 deleted (spam,…)
  • 578 marked as duplicate (out of 1125 duplicates report submitted by users)
  • 2567 remaining

On the remaining (some low numbers can be explained by the fact that some categories were added afterwards):

• Accessibility: 17
• Brainstorm: 154
• Education: 2
• Gaming: 34
• Graphics: 101
• Hardware support: 17
• Installation: 230
• Internet & Networking: 207
• Look and Feel: 290
• Multimedia: 200
• Office: 224
• Programming: 3
• Server: 46
• System: 649
• Others: 393

New front page, new smarter algorithm, new roles for moderator and Ubuntu developers, new categories,… Lots of new stuff! I believe all this will greatly help to give more attention to new ideas. Check out the new Brainstorm! Here’s the Fridge announce.

Meanwhile we have discovered a few bugs that should be quickly fixed tomorrow.

Expect a big batch of updates on Brainstorm tomorrow!