LibO Idea Handling (was: Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: [tdf-discuss] priorising feature-requests [was: LO mobile phone version])

Hi Ian, all!

Before I start - I cross-post this mail to both discuss@tdf and
website@libo, because I think it could be helpful to collect some
requirements concerning the future web infrastructure. For answers,
please use the original thread at discuss@tdf. Thanks!

The issue: There has been a proposal for a mobile version of LibO.
Although being a bit visionary in my opinion, the valid question came
up, whether there is a procedure how to propose and to rate such
(feature) proposals. People on the lists proposed a dedicated wiki
table, or a "proposal" forum. Some mentioned ratings by the Steering
Committee to somehow "accept" the ideas.

The problem isn't that new, so please read on ...

Am Freitag, den 05.11.2010, 10:55 +0000 schrieb Ian:
> On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 11:25 +0100, Dr. Bernhard Dippold wrote:
> > Hi Ian, *
> >
> > Ian Lynch wrote:
> > > [...] 
> > > Establish a simple Forum called proposals.
> >
> > I'd prefer a sortable list at the wiki / website with columns for name, date and 
> > proposal (up to 100 char), link to description, bug entry (if already filed),
> > number of votes, necessary resources and proirity. 
>
> I don't have any strong preferences about the detail of implementation,
> I was just really looking at the outline procedure.

We discussed that intensively within the OOo project some time ago,
since there have been many ideas within the User Experience team. The
goal was to have a transparent, community driven and developer friendly
process to propose and to rate (feature) ideas.

One of the larger projects (Ubuntu) maintains a website that is called
"Ubuntu Brainstorm" [1]. You can add any kind of idea that gets a short
formal check by moderators - then, anybody can rate the idea and add
additional solution ideas. Finally, there are some pretty interesting
numbers that can be used to find the high- and lowlights.

I started to document ideas for OpenOffice.org (whereas I got plenty of
help, e.g. by Ivan doing a mockup for an OOo version [2]). The summary
is available at [3] and should summarize what might be helpful for LibO,
too.

So why didn't we implement that for OOo? The biggest problems were the
availability/maintenance of the new website infrastructure (although we
got some help within the Sun UX team), and the "what to do if people
really desire a certain feature" when it comes to resources of
development. So we concluded that it is not that helpful to collect
ideas, if the chance for implementation is close to zero.

But there have been ideas. We ended up in creating wiki pages for
individual ideas that got tagged by "UX Idea" [4]. One proposal is here
(including rating at the bottom) [5], that I usually announced in the
blog [6].

Well, that works only for a few ideas, but not (really) for a number of
ideas that developers might be interested to have a look at.

So where do we stand now - people do have ideas (threads covering UI
Design, icons, ...), there is plenty of discussion (but too much for the
mailing lists), and there are more and more interested developers
(assumption, but the current activity at the developer lists is just
great). So, do we consider this to be helpful? If yes, then please add
it to the requirements list for the website infrastructure :-)

A last thing - a visual highlight embedded into the (from my
point-of-view) very good web infrastructure of KDE: [7].

Cheers,
Christoph


[1] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

[2] Example for OOo Brainstorm
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/2/2d/IdeaHandling_Proposal_IdeaTorrent1.png

[3] Summary of potential OpenOffice.org Idea Handling approaches
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Idea_Handling

[4] UX Ideas in the OOo Wiki
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Category:UX_Idea

[5] Example UX Idea
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/DocumentCheck

[6] UX idea announcement in a blog
http://uxopenofficeorg.blogspot.com/2010/01/brainstorm-new-ideas-contextual-undo.html

[7] KDE Brainstorm (both a website structure and visual highlight)
http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php#cat83


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