On 29 Apr 2008, at 17:10, Stephen Hahn wrote:

>  If you want to get a group started to write it, I'm sure we can  
> figure
>  out how to host it.  I would like to understand how to use Bugzilla's
>  voting better, which I think is related...

>  (I do think that such a list needs to be connected to a bug database,
>  so that ideas progress to problem statements and proposed solutions.

Perhaps, but I for one wouldn't want to see the actual voting to  
happen in the bug database.  Luis Villa, erstwhile GNOME bugmeister,  
summed it up quite nicely for me when the GNOME community last  
discussed whether to turn voting back on for its bugzilla:
"Basically voting in bugzillas is nothing but a way for people to  
whine about their favorite bugs in blogs, or on /., or on whatever  
other forum, and get people to stuff the 'voting box.' Votes end up  
having no bearing on actual bug validity, importance, or severity. If  
you need your bug marked up, argue persuasively in the bug that the  
bug has a serious user impact, or provide a patch."
One proposed solution was to make the vote count visible only to the  
assigned triagers/engineers, which I think bugzilla supports... but  
apart from that, on any sizeable OSS project, it's only a small  
percentage of users who ever go anywhere near the bug database, so the  
voting sample is inevitably skewed towards the sort of users who do.   
The comparative simplicity of Ubuntu's brainstorming pages may have  
the potential to redress that balance somewhat, but until somebody  
makes the effort to find out, it's hard to know for sure.
Cheeri,
Calum.
-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems


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