Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

There is an ongoing work to create a Maemo Brainstorm, a place where

• Developers, community, users, etc. can suggest ideas to Nokia and to the developers
• People can give thumps up and down to the ideas
• People can comment the ideas and other comments

The documentation and work is being done around

http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Brainstorming_new_features (principles)
http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Maemo_brainstorm (tool)
Now there is even a first mockup.

A lot of progress has been done in the maemo.org April sprint, and more will come in May (sprint page coming soon here). You can watch the sprint page to follow the progress.

Your feedback and help is welcome in the maemo-community mailing list or here.

See also the previous related threads:

• Maemo IdeaStorm
• Bugzilla or else to handle feature requests?

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Based on experience following Nokia's N-Gage brainstorm (it's a commercial version called uservoice but practically the same thing) the most important goal is to have regular updates that really are regular updates.

The people running the brainstorm should try to agree a plausible interval (perhaps once a month) where there's time to investigate bugs and features so that a proper reply can be given to each suggestion.

The N-Gage uservoice site's big problem is that the updates just didn't come regularly, sometimes there would be updates and sometimes there would be months with no word from anyone.

So basically, a guaranteed update once a month is better than a not-so-guaranteed update once a week.

The other important thing is that the people doing the updates must have the ability to get official statements from the people in charge of whatever needs fixing or enhancing. If Nokia and others refuse to talk to the people updating the brainstorm, then the brainstorm will be useless.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

This is great.

Can this be the solution to this my request for this? http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=28764

I think it would work great, IF there were a section that the topics are only opened by council.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Ah, the mock-up looks pretty good, Quim. Is it actually being developed right now, though? Or is this only planned to be developed during the next sprint?

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

It is being tested during the May Sprint. If all goes well, it may be deployed as well, but I'll bet it won't be until the June Sprint. (Just imho here.)

Tim

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

I don't understand what you mean by "update". I would expect the Nokians to pay attention and react regularly on the most voted ideas and solutions, skimming a bit for good ideas through the rest. Then maybe an idea with zero comments and votes is basically ignored by the average product manager. This is why the voting is useful in this kind of tool.

Definitely. This is one of the reasons why I haven't pushed too fast the development of the tool, since it was important to do the steps in sync with the teams, starting by my fellow product managers.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

I am not following every thread on this forum closley, but my only concern with this, is the sign-on's

I assume that we are working towards single sign on using either an ITT or maemo account?

Otherwise, I am concerned that not enough people will have access to the voting buttons. In fact right now, its very confusing if you go to maemo and you are not logged in and you try to vote thumbs up or down on something, it just sends you to a blank page, with no explanation.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

The Maemo Brainstorm is a Midgard CMS component and will be perfectily integrated to maemo.org. Same login.

About the rest, please discuss it at Task:Single sign-on for maemo.org

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Will this be the same login as talk.maemo.org, is specifically what I am asking?

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

No, will be the same login as maemo.org

Then one day we will have single sign-on And The World Will Live As One.

What will come first, brainstorm or SSO - I don't think anybody knows yet.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

To be clear with the technical minds: this Maemo Brainstorm is not a stand alone tool that needs to be synced with Midgard to re-use the maemo.org login. It's just part of Midgard CMS, like Intro, Downloads or News.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Hear, hear. (Act quick, the username, "johnlennon" may still be available!)

-T.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Imagine that! :)

Although we may have had some differences, I'm glad you're on board dude. Things are getting done.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Well, in theory yes they're supposed to constantly give feedback (like on this forum!), but at least in my experience these tools are often abandoned by their owners once the initial novelty wears off.

The N-Gage uservoice page was trumpeted with much fanfare by N-Gage staff, but the level of response from the staff just died away after a few months. Even when Nokia did actually bring out a feature requested on uservoice, they didn't bother mentioning this in the relevant uservoice threads.

One way to get round that problem is to guarantee that at least every week or month someone from Nokia will go through all the ideas and update any that need updating.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.

;)

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Some update on SSO and the different logins at the moment:

1) The same credentials are used for maemo.org, garage and the wiki, apart from that are bugzilla and talk.maemo.org

2) As quim said the brainstorm will be part of the maemo.org and use its login. It will be online in short term.

3) The SSO is considered for all the mentioned services and I am working on integrating them and building up a test-environment. As there are different services, with different user account databases, the task is pretty complex and will take some more time. The time frame is to have at least the wiki and probably one other service integrated in the test-environment until end of the month. But you can follow the status with these links and the discussion around that.

Cheers Daniel

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

I'm still trying to catch up with the long thread especulating about the next Maemo device. There are many mentions about the community being able to make suggestions on hardware. I just want to point out here that http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Maemo_brainstorm#Categories includes a category for Devices.

So yes, the Maemo Brainstorm can be a place to make suggestions about hardware and vote for them.

Like the rest of ideas in the brainstorm, they have no guarantee of being implemented but their visibility to product managers, designers, developers etc will increase.

Hopefully the brainstorm will also help the own community getting more signal and less noise about the features you want to see in future products.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Hi Quim,

How do you see this working with moderators? Can we take it for granted that hardware ideas will never make it to "under development" since Nokia doesn't comment on unreleased hardware?

Dave.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Sometimes devices are launched earlier. Sometimes there might be indeed an interest in noting that someone is working on some hardware feature for future products. Sometimes the idea might be an accessory 3rd parties can develop. And who knows if one day Maemo is taken by other device manufacturers willing to take such ideas.

Enough possibilities to consider.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

I find the idea very interesting.

Some companies (like Sony) after some success believe they KNOW what people want or need. They think that their choices will be followed blindly by willing users who will continue to pay more and more for their newest products. But they simply don't consider their customer advices.

And inevitably, after a while, they fail, because they simply don't understant anymore what people may want ... and especially if you consider that the things they want ... changes with time.

So, this brainstorm could be a very nice way for Nokia to "keep in touch" with its customers. (Or at least to pretend to do so). It would be a wonderfull begining to say :

What do you need ?
What do you want ?
What would you like ?

We can do that for you.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Good point, and I agree, but keep in mind it is Maemo Brainstorm; not Nokia Brainstorm. Not everything proposed there is a proposal directed to Nokia. The data is from the Maemo community to the Maemo community of which Nokia is part.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

...which is how the moderators are also set now, they're mostly community members. :)

In any case, Brainstorm is now open for testing. Read more from my blog.

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Thanks bergie!

Please go to http://maemo.org/community/brainstorm/ and post your own ideas, proposals, comments, ratings... No need to put too much brain in the proposals since we are still testing the tool. Just post stuff, play with the tools and report what you think is broken or needs improvement.

For instance, I think the main page needs a lot more work. How is it going to look like once we have many ideas created? Now the proposals of a single idea take too much space.

Yes, I know this is common to http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ but I wonder what is better: to give more spotlight to a single top idea or to save space in order to lit more top ideas in the default screen?

Re: Task: Maemo Brainstorm
 

Good points. We anyway need some "hot ideas" view that we can add to maemo.org frontpage, and some concepts of that could be brought to Brainstorm itself too.

Sketches and mock-ups appreciated ;)