Gentoo Brainstorm

Message

Drysh · Post by **Drysh** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 9:52 pm

Agree, but a popular idea that is also good deserves special attention.

I would like to add: Gentoo could create a new OSS development model that is based on "democracy" instead of a "benevolent dictator". This could be a tool to help that.

rlazo · Post by **rlazo** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 10:03 pm

djdunn wrote:popular ideas does not equal good ideas.

But popular ideas means a community need.

Beside if an idea is really good, then somebody else other than the original reporter should think so.

rlazo · Post by **rlazo** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 10:19 pm

Drysh wrote: 1. It must be official and should be linked to the forums' accounts.

Seems like we need to prove to the developers that this really works. Be an official resource should be a goal instead of a requirement.

Drysh wrote: 2. Instead of a completely separate discussion system, a new forum under "Discussion & Documentation" called "Gentoo Brainstorm". ...

+1

Drysh wrote: 3c. Or "n00b" = 1 vote, everybody else = 2 votes, "developer" = 3 votes.

I don't agree with this. All votes should be counted as equal and Developers have the ability to adopt the idea, or comment about it technical feasibility, so they don't to vote. Maybe an idea is not very popular but if a developer like it he could work on it without having to vote.

Drysh wrote: 4. A button should appear for "developer" only, called "Adopt this Idea"...
5. Maybe when an idea is adopted it could automatically create an entry in Gentoo Bugzilla
5a. Or it should be possible to link it to an existing entry in bugzilla...
6. Adopted ideas should have a field that any developer may edit reporting the status of that idea.

+1

Drysh wrote: 7. Everyone should be allowed to change his mind about an idea...
7b. Even developers...

Not so sure about this.

erik258 · Post by **erik258** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 10:54 pm

Drysh wrote:I'm not very good at web programming (still learning), but I'm willing to help. What should be used to develop this? The traditional MySQL + PHP + javascript or could it be done with some odd tool like, for instance, postgresql + ruby on rails (or adapt the code from Ubuntu Brainstorm)? If it will connect to the forums and/or bugzilla, how could it be done? What level of expertise in web programming is required to help creating something like this (I mean: will this be a great exercise for someone (me) trying to learn how to develop things for the web or is it too big for a beginner)???

I write in LAMP (linux, apache(2), mysql, php) and it would lend itself well to the project (yes, and some javascript). Ubuntu Brainstorm theoretically uses Drupal - that might be an easy way to do it, but tricky to integrate with the forums and bugzilla. This integration would probably take the form of access to the forum databases, possibly a good deal of it through CURL or a similar method, such that existing interfaces to the data can be adopted.

the project is probably too big for one beginner, but not a handful. I could write the project myself if my time was infinite (wouldn't that be grand?) but the more help the better. If you want to help, and know the languages, there'll be room for you on the project I'm sure. I haven't been doing this professionally for very long - there's probably a more senior developer that could help us both complete the project.

djdunn wrote:popular ideas does not equal good ideas.

Yes, but bad ideas are very unlikely to have lots of support in Gentoo. The bigger problem as I see it are silly ideas ( pointless enhancements that a number of people think are dumb, but sound good to lots of people). Another challenge might be scope drift. The ubuntu boards have a lot of topics about what boils down to new software. While software requests aren't necessarily a bad thing, they gum up the works. Small fixes and enhancements are much easier to obtain and more appropriate for this kind of environment -- after all, gentoo is a meta-distribution, not a house of code monkeys (.. ok, maybe that too :) -- but point made.)

Drysh wrote: I would like to add: Gentoo could create a new OSS development model that is based on "democracy" instead of a "benevolent dictator". This could be a tool to help that.

Benevolent Aristocracy. The aristocracy is comprised of people 'in the know,' that is who can write and debug code, ebuilds, live/minimal cd releases, et cetera. I like your idea here to some extent, but I think it's worth mentioning that the majority of gentoo users probably don't have a particuarly valuable opinion of what ought to be done on the administrative level.

That having been said, they are the end users, and can shed very valuable insight on how the system should work, as any developer will agree.

rlazo wrote:Beside if an idea is really good, then somebody else other than the original reporter should think so.

I agree completely. I think that the majority of gentooers have valuable opinions about what is a good idea and what is a bad idea. We're a much more 'with it' crowd than the ubuntuers, as can be easily seen just by following the two distros' user mailing lists for a few days.

rlazo wrote:
drysh wrote:1. It must be official and should be linked to the forums' accounts.
Seems like we need to prove to the developers that this really works. Be an official resource should be a goal instead of a requirement.

I agree strongly. The devs and sysadmins on the official servers are going to want to see something up and running before they receive too many requests to improve it. We can start working on this without their help, without even their blessings (although it'd be very comforting to have them).

rlazo wrote:
Drysh wrote:2. Instead of a completely separate discussion system, a new forum under "Discussion & Documentation" called "Gentoo Brainstorm". ...
+1

++! I also agree with this point. I don't know what kind of restrictions should be placed on editing the original brainstorm post, but I do think that discussions should be moved to the forums, where I think they belong. The brainstorm site simply shows popularity and progress of the concept, rather than facilitating discussions.

rlazo wrote:
drysh wrote:3c. Or "n00b" = 1 vote, everybody else = 2 votes, "developer" = 3 votes.
I don't agree with this.

Me neither. As you say, developers can make something happen regardless. The poorly informed aren't going to make anything happen by themselves. I think the likeliness of the popularity of something being 'poisoned' by newbies is being exaggerated by some people, not that it doesn't exist. As I said, the core of the gentoo population, at least on the mailing list, is a pretty smart crowd.

The changing mind thing gets a little tricky in implementation. What, are we going to track every vote and who voted for it? Maybe we should, I guess... what are other peoples' thoughts on implementation?

Drysh · Post by **Drysh** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:56 am

erik258 wrote:The changing mind thing gets a little tricky in implementation. What, are we going to track every vote and who voted for it? Maybe we should, I guess... what are other peoples' thoughts on implementation?

We will need to track who voted for what anyway to prevent people from voting twice/hundreds of times. It could be done with a table votes = (idea_id = int, user_id = int, agree = bool) and a select to count the votes. If the pk = (idea_id, user_id) in that order, it both prevents multiple votes in the same idea and indexes the table by idea_id, making the select faster. To change your mind is just to edit that table (the agree field).

About 1. - Ok, we could start and have a working system without devs help. But I cannot see it being used unless it's official. And it won't be possible to create a new forum and use the forums account without devs help.

About 3. - Maybe only making noobs votes count half a vote. There are people with too much time in their hands and who don't like to play nice. I think something to prevent them from creating new forum accounts just to vote will be good.
Another way would be to only allow users registered more than a week/month ago to vote. The DB of the forums already knows when a user joined, it won't be that hard to implement.

Also: 8. It should also be possible to link the idea to GLEP. Not automatically, but if an idea becomes a GLEP, it should be clear (not just posted in the discussion).

Drysh · Post by **Drysh** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 7:07 am

Insomnia can be a good thing... I was reading random forums and found a link to something useful.

http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/ge ... ts/forums/

Gentoo phpBB

The code found here is derived from phpBB[1] and is what is running on the
Gentoo Forums[2]. We have made many modifications to the code to improve the
scalability, adminsitrative tasks and to implement user-requested features.

Lots of the features that have been implemented are very specific to the Gentoo
Forums and may not make any sense to other users, if something doesn't make
sense just ignore it.

So it is possible to create a sandbox Gentoo Forums to test the Gentoo Brainstorm against it.

bytenirvana · Post by **bytenirvana** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 7:13 pm

I'm a German based Webdeveloper and I offer help to realize "Gentoo Brainstorm" in my spare time. I have experience in webdesign, PHP and MySQL (and a touch RoR - but I abandoned it for cakephp: a "rails like" php-framwork).

I see "Gentoo Brainstorm" as a community sensor. However I fear it could be fruitless when there is no support/"backup" from the developer site.

As a start we could work with a sandbox Gentoo forum to interlink it with the user db and test the generation of a idea-discussion-thread in a subforum.

erik258 · Post by **erik258** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 1:09 am

bytenirvana,

Glad to hear you're with us. We'll need your help to make this happen!

Official status will be somewhat easier to attain once we have a working system methinks.

Drysh,

excellent points, all. Good input. If you want to write up a rough draft of some mysql tables, I'd love to see them.

seqizz · Post by **seqizz** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 7:56 am

i think we aren't talking about a "fully official & guaranteed what you vote" brainstorm site.. or we?

Januszzz · Post by **Januszzz** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 7:44 am

I personally don't think that something like the Ubuntu brainstorm would be suitable for Gentoo. If you look carefully, they are all related to installing/managing Ubuntu or upstream feature requests. If users have any requests for Gentoo, they can file a bug

I disagree. Users need brainstorm. A while ago I posted some "great" ideas about some parts of Gentoo. They have response on forum, but has gone in time. Brainstorm would put more attention to them.

I fully agree with others that we need brainstorm.

<3 · Post by <3 » Thu Mar 20, 2008 8:29 am

Going off the results of the poll thus far it looks like the community is in favor of this idea. So I'd like to ask the OP when can we expect to see this project getting started? Have you found people willing to work on this? Best bet is to get started on something like this soon before that new project smell wears off.

gentoo-dev · Post by **gentoo-dev** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:46 am

Januszzz wrote:Users need brainstorm. A while ago I posted some "great" ideas about some parts of Gentoo. They have response on forum, but has gone in time. Brainstorm would put more attention to them.

Maybe they were not such great ideas after all, or you simply failed to bring them to those in power, you know, the devs, few of them scour these forums...

steveL · Post by **steveL** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 2:04 pm

erik258 wrote:That having been said, they are the end users, and can shed very valuable insight on how the system should work, as any developer will agree.

Well, any professional one would; a lot of Gentoo devs are students.

As you say, developers can make something happen regardless. The poorly informed aren't going to make anything happen by themselves. I think the likeliness of the popularity of something being 'poisoned' by newbies is being exaggerated by some people, not that it doesn't exist. As I said, the core of the gentoo population, at least on the mailing list, is a pretty smart crowd.

Yeah, and on IRC. A Linux "power-"user easily has enough skills to be a Windows sysadmin. A Gentoo power-user has enough skills to run a distro (as long as it's portage-based ;)

The changing mind thing gets a little tricky in implementation. What, are we going to track every vote and who voted for it? Maybe we should, I guess... what are other peoples' thoughts on implementation?

You pretty much have to in any case, so that people can't vote more than once on a particular poll. Given that this isn't about electing a President or anything, and also that most of us would be quite happy to explain our reasoning for voting, I'd opt for doing just that. If we allow -5 to +5 for the vote, it'd be much better imo. That way we can also track, for example, how the "mood" changes wrt a certain issue over time, which I think would be quite novel.

I've got some experience with PHP, and we can get some code off one of my co-workers that he did a few years ago, which integrated phpBB into a CMS (originally based on postNuke) with LDAP/AD etc (which we ain't gonna need :) so we can get some support as well, even if we don't need that code. Try /msg friendlyToaster hello next time you're on irc.freenode.org.

jumico · Post by **jumico** » Sat Mar 29, 2008 8:51 am

You could use the message board post rating system as a simple way to create a quick brinstorm.
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... 5#p3584815
It says you can have the topic rated buy the rating of the first post.
I still don't think this would be a very good system but it would be a start. You would be able to see threads with high and low ratings and I guess popularity, but that would just be number of posts.
Of course this is assuming the correct person would implement it.

nand-nd · Post by **nand-nd** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 11:06 am

Hi!

I'm one of the guys working on Ubuntu Brainstorm.
I'm seeing some motivation here to create a Brainstorm site! But why not re-using what already exists?
Brainstorm is freely available under the GPL, and installation instructions are here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brainstorm/Installation

Brainstorm is still in development, - and I can tell you there are *lots* to do-, and uniting efforts on its development sounds a good path to follow.
Sure there will be some efforts needed to make the current Brainstorm "project-neutral", but I believe it should not be too much.

If some of you are interested, you can pass by #ubuntu-testing on freenode, or just answer here

<3 · Post by <3 » Fri Apr 04, 2008 12:38 am

<3 wrote:Going off the results of the poll thus far it looks like the community is in favor of this idea. So I'd like to ask the OP when can we expect to see this project getting started? Have you found people willing to work on this? Best bet is to get started on something like this soon before that new project smell wears off.

Rad · Post by **Rad** » Fri Apr 04, 2008 10:24 pm

This wishlist for users thing may work well for Ubuntu because Canonical cares about market share and user satisfaction.

For Gentoo's near 100% self-catering community, its not directly a bad idea, but we should be able to come up with a better system that relates more to things that also will help developers to get the job done (describing features in detail, voting on and/or implementing things on technical implementations, finding consensus and solutions where stuff tangents organizational things...).

pigeon768 · Post by **pigeon768** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 1:41 am

This is a great idea. Without a brainstorm.gentoo.org site, Gentoo users have zero means to propose new ideas, discuss them in detail, or vote about them in polls.

....oh wait.

node_one · Post by **node_one** » Mon Apr 07, 2008 8:17 pm

What is currently the proper way of getting feedback on ideas? Do I need to check all the GLEPs, Bugzilla, mailing list archives, and forum posts beforehand? Also in which of the mentioned places should ideas go? Anyway, I do not know if having a Gentoo Brainstorm is necessary as long as it is clear(er) for newer users how they can suggest possible improvements to Gentoo in the most effective manner.

wim-x · Post by **wim-x** » Wed Apr 09, 2008 11:26 am

dict.org wrote:brainstorm: to try to solve a problem by discussing it exhaustively in an intense group meeting encouraging uninhibited and spontaneous contributions from all members.

In my experience this is how brainstorms are conducted most effectively; by departing from a problem and finding a solution by discussing the aspects of the problem and out-of-the-box ideas about solutions.

The starting point of a problem would always be a problem. Following that, the problem could be further defined in one thread while possible solutions could be discussed in another. Ideally, these discussions would have to happen sequentially, because an optimal solution cannot be found before the problem is defined fully.

The problem definition thread should be monitored more thorougly than other forum threads (if a forum is the place to do this). We only want constructive comments that elaborate on the problem definition, not comments on why you don't think its a problem.
Also, this thread should be "solved" by creating an elaborate but concise problem definition which would be the starting point of the problem solution thread.

In order to create an intense group meeting, irc discussions could be planned for each problem. Interested users could sign in beforehand and part take in the discussion while the problem initiator takes notes of the discussion and posts a summary.

<3 · Post by <3 » Thu Jul 10, 2008 3:24 am

Was kinda looking forward to this. GJ getting my hopes up.

Akhouk · Post by **Akhouk** » Thu Jul 10, 2008 6:56 am

Perhaps we should set up a brainstorming site to see exactly how this brainstorming site would work.

SnakeByte · Post by **SnakeByte** » Sun Jul 27, 2008 5:12 pm

/me voted "no"

There is no need for a new website just for this.

Because there is already a wiki, this could just go as another wiki page.

The wiki discussion function could also be used as voting system.

Then the main forces behind gentoo or volunteers
can screen this stuff and as soon as something is decided to be done,
open a bugzilla tracker and link it from the wiki page.

Also we have to seperate gentoo and general linux topics
to not end up having all the same entries as ubunto or <distribution x> has

regards

Gentoo Brainstorm

Is a Gentoo Brainstorming site a good idea?

Re: Brainstorm about Gentoo Brainstorm

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