My introduction & Idea Storm for F10

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 1:19 AM, Rahul Sundaram
<sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> The feature list gets filled by following the policy outlined in
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy
>
> This is based not just on popularity but someone or a team actually willing
> to work on any particular feature.


And let me stress that the importance of doing it this way.  Unlike
Dell, the bulk of the work done directly as part of this project is
volunteer.  Having a long list of wishlist or popularity list of
potential features is a recipe for disaster unless there are people
who are committed to doing any of the work. An Idea Storm sort of
thing is only going to be valuable if people are prepared to actually
use it as a way to decide what they are going to work on.

And as a Board member, I can't just point at people and tell them to
work on something that other people want.  I have a hard enough time
convincing people to do what I want, and I was voted in based on
'popular' support.  Popular opinion doesn't translate directly into
interest in working towards getting it done.  We simply do not have
the resources to direct people to work on things they aren't
interested in working on.  It just doesn't work that way at the larger
Fedora project-wide level.  The Feature process is there to make sure
that we are doing what we can as a Project to adequately track and
support people who have made a commitment to do the hard work of
making something new happen.

Now that isn't to say that some groups of contributors or even
particular individuals wouldn't be interested in working on something
based on popularity. I would not be one of those people, but they
could very well exist.  As a starting point for any serious discussion
on how to do something like an Idea Storm, I would need to see a group
of contributors commited to the  ideal behind the concept.  If you
want to see an Idea Storm attempted, first find the group of
developers/maintainers/contributors with a broad enough skillset to be
an effective development team.  Have those people affirm publicly that
they will make the commitment to try to use an Idea Storm like list to
direct the work that they do.  We can then have a real discussion
about how to position and run an Idea Storm. Once we settle on that,
the team can run an Idea Storm, cull a concept, make a plan and then
put an item on the Proposed Feature List for the next release like any
other development group could.

But you know what, I haven't seen skilled contributors asking to run
this sort of thing anytime someone asks about it. I think there's more
than enough work to go around as it stands. People aren't just
standing around idle waiting for something to work on.  I don't think
this Project's problem is finding more work to do. I think the problem
is finding more people to do more work.  An Idea Storm will not help
that.

Failing the creation of such a development team to serve the whims of
the populace, these sort of activities should be done inside the scope
of an appropriate SIG who is receptive to making use of this sort of
information.  If a particular SIG wants to makes a commitment to
organize its available resources around a popularity poll...it's up to
them.

The key idea here is there really needs to be a group of contributors
willing to make use of a poll in a meaningful way, before we bother
constructing this sort of poll. Having a long list of things languish
and see no love..is a PR lose.  If we are going to do it, then people
must step forward and commit to using it before me generate the list.

-jef