[maemo-community] Brainstorm: useful?

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> Isn't an engaged
> and QUALIFIED minority better than a vocal, superficial, unqualified
> public?

Better for what?

It all depends on your goal - the goal of Bugzilla is not the same as
the goal for Brainstorm.

Actually, has anyone explicitly stated the goals of these sites? I mean,
why do we have them?

My initial understanding of Brainstorm was "a site where people could
propose new features for Maemo, and have a reasonable expectation that
those ideas will be included in future Maemo plans".

This serves a double purpose - allowing a large number of people to vote
for features they want to see, and making Bugzilla explicitly a place
for defect reporting. I don't believe that the intention with Brainstorm
was to establish a direct relationship between Brainstorm casual users &
Maemo developers - rather, it was to provide a filter, and the most
popular ideas & solutions get considered for inclusion in future
roadmaps (not necessarily by developers).

Bugzilla's mission is "to provide Maemo developers with good quality
defect reports, and to provide Maemo users with a direct feedback
channel to the developers".

If you have too many users or too few developers, Bugzilla fails in its
mission. Bugzilla, unlike Brainstorm, does provide a direct channel from
developers to users. So it's reasonable to qualify Bugzilla users by
raising the barrier to entry, to ensure the quality of bug reports. So
we have a bugsquad that qualifies bugs & redirects them to the right
person, filters duplicates & takes care of the filter work, so that
developers get the high quality reports they expect & can ask questions
directly to users experiencing the problem.


> Anyway, even Talk would be better than Brainstorm. My problem is that
> trying to brainstorm for an undefined period of time, presenting some
> half-baked solutions for voting on and then splitting the votes
> because the solutions aren't orthogonal isn't going to produce a good
> outcome.

I agree that currently it's unclear what the end-point is. Do good ideas
get proposed to designers for further development? How do we know which
ideas have been included in future roadmaps? What's the finality, and
what's the process for getting there? In a bug, the lifecycle's well
defined - bug report, comments, Q&A, proposed patches by developers &
bug reporters, patch committed, bug fixed (or, bug closed as invalid or
not to be fixed, either way, there's a definite end-point).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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