Fwd: Collecting feature requests

[Casey Ho]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Casey Ho <pidgin at caseyho.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 3:12 PM
Subject: Re: Collecting feature requests
To: Kevin Stange <kevin at simguy.net>


On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Kevin Stange <kevin at simguy.net> wrote:
> Casey Ho wrote:
>> Just a few minutes ago I created a new "brainstorm" area on the site:
>> http://community.pidgin.im/brainstorm/
>>
>> The goal of the site is to have a more open place to collect requests
>> from users and figure out which ones are the most popular.  The code
>> running this is the same as the code for Ubuntu Brainstorm
>> (brainstorm.ubuntu.com).
>
> Is there some way we can just make managing RFEs on trac more visible.
> This technique is going to cause mass duplication of information and
> take the focus away from the trac, which is what developers actually
> look at when dealing with Pidgin related development.  The more fancy
> widgets we have to play with, the less organized it gets and the less
> likely anyone's going to see it, and the more likely that misinformation
> appears in one or more locations.
>
> This is one of the reasons we don't have a forum and never will.
>
>> Of course, what gets most voted on the site will be orthogonal to what
>> actually gets implemented.  That's fine, I just wanted to reduce the
>> amount of feature request juggling that needs to occur on Trac + make
>> it easy for users to "feel heard".
>
> I'm concerned this site will be completely ignored by developers and
> thus it will be a waste of server resources and the time of users who
> are giving input.  I would rather make it easier for people to search
> for feature requests on Trac so everything is able to be monitored in
> one place.  Trac is extensible, so I'm sure an interface of some kind
> could put together a fancy page like this and not have so much overhead
> and data separation.
>
>> Note: The new site runs Drupal, which means we can extend this in the
>> future.  On the downside, Drupal is resource intensive (Sean already
>> pointed this out).  I went with Drupal+Brainstorm because it was the
>> only available open source solution.
>
> One of our goals has been to avoid making the web site too complicated
> so as to avoid generating extra load on our servers, which have limited
> processing power.  It's the reason I rewrote the site and killed off the
> former CMS our designer had given us.  I don't want to be using any CMS
> infrastructure if we can avoid it.
>
> Kevin

You seem to have missed the point of Brainstorm.

The point was _NOT_ to improve our development tools.

The point was to improve our user relations.

There was no intent that developers would ever need to even look at
such a site.  By corollary, I never expected it to be a huge driver of
development either- mainly because some of the ideas are already being
worked on (good!).

Yes things will be redundant.  But it's a place for users to vent, for
users to find out that other users care too and for an idea to be
picked up by a new patch writer or plugin developer.  The latter point
is the most important, because right now everything that happens in
Pidgin needs to be filtered by the developers first- ala the
Cathedral.

-Casey