On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 6:50 AM, Richard Owlett <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm working on a personal project has some rather odd (OK already
> WEIRD ;) goals and constraints. I wish to ask questions without
>  getting referrals to "How to ask a question" or "don't do that" etc.
>

Wes put his response to this well, and I agree with it.

I think your title was even more spot-on when it used the term
"brainstorming".  The best place to get rapid interchange of ideas is in
some real-time forum:  say, a PLUG meeting after-beers (or even an explicit
meeting to brainstorm on this topic :))  Fall back to a group chat like IRC
which has some benefits over in-person meeting:  serves geo-distributed
participants and can allow a history upon which people who couldn't attend
due to time constraints can still comment.

Your constraints are as Wes pointed out pretty narrow and specific.  How
about you tell us the *problem you're trying to solve* so we can use this
existing forum - which draws upon a lot of expertise across many of the
areas touching features you mention - to suggest already-existing pieces to
contribute to your solution?

I work with my company's product management organization closely and while
customers often want a (sometimes very specific) feature, they are always
trying to solve a problem.  Finding out that problem allows us to say "this
is already solved in a way you didn't expect. try doing it this other way"
or "we have no plans to solve that problem, by your suggested feature
(which it sometimes turns out won't even solve their problem) or otherwise;
 our best suggestion is to try another vendor".  talking about problems is
IMNSHO a much more productive way to frame goals:  when you have a problem,
solutions are many.  when you have a narrow set of guidelines without a
specified problem, you are liable to receive narrowly focused
recommendations (or none at all) that end up not solving your problem.

That said, it sounds like some fertile grounds for what you *appear* to be
trying to accomplish would be in distributions (surely some are
debian-based) designed for space or third world countries, where bandwidth
to the outside is extremely limited.
Those communities (sorry, I don't know any, but I think the pointer is
valid) might be a good place to start looking for information on working
completely off-line as well as stripping down existing distros to remove
unneeded features.
_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

Reply via email to