In reply to the original email and the suggestions that followed: (1) I agree that it would be good if users could easily specify feature requests, and if there was some way of finding out how much each of them is wanted.
(2) This could also inspire new extension projects. Users may not know what fits into SMW or into any other extension, so it would be good to have a central mechanism for collecting ideas. (3) I agree that Bugzilla-like organization of information makes sense, but that Bugzilla is not fully suitable. Using some templates and forms, one could easily copy the Bugzilla structure without its restrictions. This has been done, e.g. by Ryan Lane in an SMW-based trouble ticket system. semantic-mediawiki.org would be a good place for this. (4) Such a setup would connect to our recent discussion about collecting interesting implementation tasks. Features are always more fun to implement than bug fixes, and a well-organised list of features could be a starting point for new contributors. (5) It is never easy to measure how important a feature is. We cannot expect such broad interest that we really get representative opinions for our whole community. But a wiki system could have links to user pages to record support. (6) The Roadmap is not immediately related to this. It is a list of things that someone wants to do, not of things that someone wants to be done. It is organised by extension (cf. (2)). The process of editing it is to talk to the maintainer of the respective extension. So my proposal is to set up a form-based feature requesting system and to see how it goes. One or two people are needed to create and maintain this system; please step forward. It does not need to be perfect initially. We may need only a few form fields: title, description, related extension (or "unknown/new"), maybe a list of related bug reports on Bugzilla, status of the request. Comments could be implemented with a subform (list of items; easy to delete accidentally) or on extra pages (pulled in with a query; cooler, but needs another "add comment" form that autogenerates a page name and links to the original request). The description should be collaboratively edited (i.e. not owned by the user who reported it), the comments should not. Could/should LiquidThreads be used for having comments below a page instead of on the talk page? To me it seems that this could be an exciting approach for many, especially smaller software projects, so we might actually set standards doing this. We can also directly link such facilities from SMWAdmin to get more users involved. Markus On 24/02/2011 19:29, Jeroen De Dauw wrote: > Hey, > > Following the recent discussions about the roadmap, I'm asking myself if > there is no need for a process to get new items on it. I have several > idea's that I think would be nice to implement, but not maybe not > everyone agrees they should be. I think ideally there should be some > place to request features with something that allows the community to > categorize these by demand. And then a mechanism to check if the > features with high demand make sense to put on the roadmap, and find out > where to best put them. > > Some people might think this is overkill since there is very little > community involvement with these things right now, but I think this is > in part caused by the current way of doing things itself. Right now I > can either create a page somewhere with a list of stuff I want to have > implemented, that no one will ever seriously look at, or just place > things directly onto the roadmap. > > I'm not sure what would be a good approach here, but it's probably a > good idea to have a look at how other communities are managing this. I'd > be very interested in other peoples thoughts (and suggestions) on this. > > Cheers > > -- > Jeroen De Dauw > http://www.bn2vs.com > Don't panic. Don't be evil. > -- > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Free Software Download: Index, Search& Analyze Logs and other IT data in > Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data > generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual > or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business > insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev > > > > _______________________________________________ > Semediawiki-devel mailing list > Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Software Download: Index, Search & Analyze Logs and other IT data in Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
