Many of you know that KDE Brainstorm ideas aren’t posted straight away: they are always pre-screened to avoid repetitions, features that cannot be implemented technically, violations of the Code of Conduct, and so on. This is possible thanks to the work of the Idea Moderators, that patrol Brainstorm and evaluate the new ideas being posted. Recently, a few of them got too busy and thus we’re experiencing a backlog of ideas staying in the Vault (the staging area for evaluation) for longer times than usual.

The recent post by Dario on the KDE Workspace Vision raised some concerns on why Brainstorm was not used.One commenter even said _Right now it feels like “Throw an idea over a wall for no-one but end users to discuss until it bitrot’s”. _ _ _ The Brainstorm section is indeed in need of help. To make it more useful, a couple of things are needed: Statistics to evaluate which ideas are best representative: it can’t be just the number of votes per se as there are things like confirmation bias or controversies that may inflate the numbers Integration with Bugzilla: a way to automatically (using XML-RPC) send the ideas flagged as representative to a bug report filed under “wishlist”.

The KDE Brainstorm, where users can post and vote for feature requests for KDE, is the most visited area of the KDE Community Forums. In an effort to improve the experience of both users and developers, the KDE Community Forums staff is proud to present a brand new version of the KDE Brainstorm.  The new interface resembles the IdeaTorrent sites, but it is still powered by the forum software (phpBB), a clear example of the flexibility of the platform.

Hello, and welcome to the first “issue” of the KDE Brainstorm monthly digest. First of all, a few words of introduction. There are quite a number of ideas being posted on the KDE Brainstorm, and it would be nice to know how the initiative is faring, and important highlights, like what ideas are more popular, which are more controversial, etc. That is why the idea of a monthly digest was born (in a similar fashion as the fabolous Commit Digest).

Via Harald Hvaal’s blog I learnt that the first non-forum suggestion has been implemented! I think this shows without doubt that initiatives like the KDE Brainstorm are undoubtedly useful to the community at large, both users and developers. Keep on rocking!

Now that the KDE Brainstorm has been launched, it’s time to take a look at the results so far. Currently, the forum hosts 160 threads, approximately one for each idea, and 441 posts. Not bad for the first two days of operation. At the same time, the staff has been working hard to make sure only appropriate ideas (not bug reports, not duplicates…) are on the forum. People have also begun voting, although slowly: it’s understandable, given the fact that there are so many threads in so little time.

It’s finally there: KDE Brainstorm has been launched today! Like this, it will be possible to propose features and have them voted by the community, and then submit the most voted requests to the developers. Every feature request is screened prior to posting, so duplicates, spam and flames are unlikely to occur. There is no guarantee that the voted upon features will be implemented, but as opposed to individual postings, this approach reduces the noise a lot, and allows a better communication between the “two worlds” (users and developers).