Once you've read the details below, please respond with an acknowledgement and let me know if you can participate. The expected time investment is on the order of a couple of hours over the next two weeks.
Last November, the Technical Board recently began a new program to respond to top voted topics on Ubuntu Brainstorm: http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2010/11/03/weathering-the-ubuntu-brainstorm/ with the first two rounds of responses summarised here: http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2010/12/10/ubuntu-brainstorm-top-10-for-december-2010/ http://www.piware.de/2011/04/top-ideas-on-ubuntu-brainstorm-march-2011/ Our goal is to improve our responsiveness to the questions, concerns and suggestions we receive from the user community. Note that this does NOT mean that we will commit to following the suggestions, but we will evaluate and respond to them. By explaining what we will (or won't) do and why, we will show that we are paying attention and trying to make good decisions on behalf of our users. The way the program works is that the Technical Board identifies people within the Ubuntu project who are knowledgeable in the specific topics proposed in Brainstorm, and asks each of them to write a short response to one topic. One of the most popular topics in Brainstorm at present is a request for separate music and video player options: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/27730/ To me, this appears to be fixed in Oneiric (System Settings -> System Info -> Default Applications has both Music and Video settings), but I suggest reviewing the comments to see if I'm missing something. Since you are well versed in this area, we would appreciate if you could spend a short time reading the Brainstorm content about it and writing a few paragraphs. You don't need to have all the answers, and I encourage you to ask for input from others who might have a view on the issue. This can be in the form of a detailed upstream bug report, a blog post, an email, or any other suitable format. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two to complete. Our goal is to have everything ready for publication by the 27th of September. Can you confirm that you're willing and able to help with this? You can formulate your response as you see fit, but make sure that the tone is sympathetic. Many of the comments in Brainstorm take the form of demands or complaints: just treat these as if they were questions, and answer them politely. Try to listen to the *need* behind the suggestion, not just the suggestion itself, and connect with your audience by telling a story about it. Here are some example formulas which might be helpful to you: * "It sounds like the problem described here is X. We address that in Ubuntu today by doing A, B and C. Maybe that's not working for everyone because of Y. We could improve this by doing Z." * "I would love to see a new feature like that in Ubuntu. It's consistent with the way other parts of Ubuntu work, and seems genuinely useful. We're busy with some higher priority projects at the moment like X, but if someone is interested in writing a patch for this, I will help them get it into Ubuntu and upstream." * "This is a really hard problem without an easy solution. It's complex because of X, Y and Z. It will take some time for this to be completely solved, but here are a few projects we're working on which will make things better, bit by bit." * "That's an easy fix. I've written a patch and uploaded it to Oneiric. It will be in the 11.10 release!" * "That's a great idea, and we already thought of it! Here's the blueprint, and here's how you can follow along as this gets implemented in Natty." * "I passed on your suggestion to the upstream developer of the software, and we had a conversation about it. Here's what we decided." * "This seems like a genuine problem, but I'm not sure that's the right solution, because of X and Y. I asked our usability expert Jill about this, and here's what she suggested." * "I didn't understand what the problem was here, so I had a conversation on IRC with Jamie, who submitted this topic to Brainstorm to understand better. Here's how it went: [...] In the end, we both decided that the best course of action is X." If you have any further questions about what is expected here, please let me know. Thank you in advance! -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@ubuntu.com] pp. Ubuntu Technical Board -- technical-board mailing list technical-board@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
