Re: Project Proposal: GNOME Innovation

[Luis Menina <liberforce freeside fr>]

Wolter Hellmund a écrit :
> In the following message, I will suggest the creation of a new project
> entitled GNOME Innovation

Hi,
I'm going to summarize why I am strongly against that proposal. My 
reflexion is based on what I saw in Mandriva's equivalent to Ubuntu 
brainstorm.

1. This creates new work to triage good/bad ideas. To be thoughtful, 
this needs some people with GNOME good knowledge. It will distract these 
people from triaging bugs directly in bugzilla, or work on something else.

2. More input doesn't mean more manpower. Even if some ideas are good, 
this doesn't bring new developers to do the actual job.

3. It lowers the knowledge requirements too much. The consequence is 
that every single clueless user that thinks he has a good idea leaves a 
few "ideas", and even more clueless users vote for it. People that have 
the knowledge to differenciate good/doable ideas from the others 
generally know what a bugzilla is, and fill an enhancement request...

4. Because of (3), most of the ideas I saw on these websites are 
duplicates of bugzilla bugs or enhancement requests, or are just stuff 
that already exists, but that the (noob) user didn't find in his desktop.

5. Because of (3) and (4), the signal/noise ratio is very low.

6. The few people that don't know how to use a bugzilla *and* that will 
propose valuable ideas are most likely going to be pissed off when 
they'll see it ends up not being implemented, or after a ridiculously 
long amount of time. Remember we still have bugs in bugzilla that are 
several years old ! Some of them with patches roting ! Let's fix that 
before even thinking of the next new *cool* feature the users want.

7. Who would do the work ? As someone already explained, this is not how 
things work in a community. The ones who decide are not the ones who 
want, but the ones who actually do the job. If you don't plan to do it 
yourself, but just rely on other's people work, you've already lost 50% 
chances to have this ever be done. The Git migration for exemple 
happened, because some people wanted that to happen, made a survey, and 
stepped in to do the job.

We already lack manpower. Please don't fall on this. It just bring more 
work with only very small foreseeable gains. Thumbs down.
--
Luis