On 03/12/2015 20:46, Sam Foster wrote:
The disagreement, I think, is in the belief that addressing the
most-voted foxfooding bugs in this list
<http://foxfooding.github.io/dashboard/> will meaningfully change
our position. I don't think that list contains enough meaningful
data to be referenced as a substantial part of our strategic
trajectory.
A request to implement CardDAV doesnt seem like it requires a
substantial change to our strategic trajectory? And no-one is
suggesting we delegate product strategy to the crowd. This is a
channel for input - no more or less. In that context, 300+ votes seems
like quite a large number. I suspect we would struggle to get the same
consensus even internally around some of the features we've shipped.
In this particular case perhaps we would accept a patch? In that case
a mentored bug(s) seems like that best action.
For the specific example of CardDAV support, I have assign myself on
this bug quite some time ago. Things are - slowly - moving. To make
things short, there are preliminary steps: we need some changes in the
contact API to be able to sync stuff reliably. AFAIK the contact team
will discuss about that in Mozlando. The ultimate goal is to provide an
architecture that will make possible to add contact providers via
external privileged apps. That way, people would be able to add contact
providers (google, CardDAV etc...) as easily as possible in FxOS (it
won't ever be trivial to write such an app, but we'll try to make things
as easy as possible).
I'm also working on a google contact client that helps me experiment
with this. So hopefully, contact sync will be a thing "soon".
My long term goal is to extract from these 2 providers a "template app"
that people could fork to get started quickly (not sure it is even
possible to do so, but I'll try).
So in a more general way, I think this is exactly what we want: people
from the community that step in and take features (and bugs). That is
the Mozilla way of differientiating right? Some ideas to do so:
- We should agree on a good measurement of feature popularity (already a
hard stuff to do apparently :-) ). By default we have votes. I don't
mind if we find something else, but reliability is - again - NOT the
only criteria. You have to think about /perception/. This measurement
should be reliable, and perceived as such by the community. Meaning
people will get an incentive to give their feedbacks because they feel
they have an impact, starting a virtuous cycle. This is really important
to make this measurement /really /reliable (ie, used by enough people).
Again, I do think votes (not necessarily on BMO) can provide such
measurement, even if it is on a preselected list that would be
compatible with our strategy.
- Then, we need to aggressively promote those "most-wanted" (not using
"most-voted" in purpose) bugs to be taken. Either some MoCo employees
take it, or it has a mentor, and we are actively trying to find an
assignee in the community.
We can have: weekly most wanted mentored bugs posted on dev-fxos, or on
any suitable mailing-list, have a link to this list on a website, post
on blogs (Mozilla Hacks) or on reddit etc etc... Btw, a link to this
list could appear near the "Donate to Mozilla" that starts to appear
everywhere. It could be a "Donate to Mozilla, either money or time" or
something better said. That would also makes us appear less greedy and
more focused to some (annoying) people.
- Maybe also promote when one of these bugs have been resolved. "This
week, the following bug have been resolved:... congrats to X,Y,Z for
this! Here are the next bugs we need to kill"
I'm always a bit sceptical when hearing about our "strategic
trajectory". I have yet to understand ours, to be very honest. And
again, our strategy is completely useless if it's not well understood
and accepted among the people that can promote us (this does not exclude
Carrier and OEM though, but should include geeks and nerds, because
ultimately their promotion will make their friends, relatives etc buy
some FxOS phones). Maybe it's just because I'm more interested on
technical stuff than everything else, but maybe there's a more deep
issue here.
Actually, I miss the old days when people were sayings that Mozilla was
awesome, and that they were really doing the right thing (in fact, I'm
too young for that, but you get the idea). Nowadays, the dominant voice
among geeks and technical people is "they lost it". Ok, people are
always ranting, but the general consensus about Mozilla these days is
worrisome.
Thanks for reading another French ranting ;-)
Cheers,
Augustin Trancart
Phoxygen
I take your point about ticking feature boxes. By itself it isn't a
strategy (build it and they will come.) Maybe as our actual strategy
crystallizes we'll get feature requests that better align with where
we want to go.
/Sam
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