This is great! Thanks a lot Reggie! It looks like it does not conflict with threads I've already subscribed to, which is great. I would personally love to see "Active Topics" replaced with threads from my subscribed-to forums, but that might be harder.

BTW, it just occurred to me that another similar workaround that is already in place is forum-specific RSS feeds. Instead of subscribing to, say, five forums I can create five RSS feeds. Then, instead of going to t.m.o. to look for new posts, I would go to my RSS reader for new posts.

Reggie, I monitor this forum all day while at work. Is there any forum option that would allow me to enable sounds so that whenever there was a screen refresh (a new post) my computer (either N800 or desktop) would output a single chime. ( like when we receive an instant message). ?

One thing I would like to see done quickly: more sub-subforums. For starters, expand Community:

Community
- Ask the Council
- Meetups
- Website
- General

Can that be done?

Is it me the only one thinking that http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...sign_for_2010/ has gone out of control? Brainstorm proposals need to be around a concrete proposal.

Now what? Imagine that one of the 21(!) "solutions" is under development. Should we move the whole proposal to In Development and leave a big question mark about all the rest?

It is a bit out of control-- but then, that's an expected attribute of the process, which goes:

Forming
Storming
Norming
Performing

You're seeing a hot topic fueled by passionate people, and one idea from one person begetting 3 more from others. Typical Storming phase.

Some solutions are certainly ripe for Norming, and even Performing-- but they are well out of the ability of proposers to implement. They require a champion, and of course Doers.

FYI, the group development process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forming...and_performing

Sure, but the group development process can also be done creating new brainstorm proposals when new ideas appear thanks to previous discussions. Otherwise the brainstorm proposal become bigger, the discussion threads longer and at some point it is difficult to have any focus.

But anyway, at least with this one it's the community alone who decides so I don't need to figure out how to handle the feedback/discussion with the Maemo team.

I guess I'm a bit confused... I thought it was okay to have multiple solutions per proposal, and we could "pick them off" individually for action. So what if the root proposal takes on numerous solutions? IMO the fewer root proposals (ie, higher problem abstraction) the easier this is to manage. Just look at the overlap we've had!

I'm thinking we may be concerned about different problems...

Ok, I'll be specific about http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...sign_for_2010/

Solutions 1-8 are all about the specific problem of dealing with different subforums, tags, devices so people can find better the information relevant to their device. Good, this makes sense and the alternative/complementary solutions try to solve a same problem.

Then solutions 9-11 are more about rating signal vs noise. Which is an interesting discussion too. But better in a new brainstorm with separate discussion thread.

Solutions 12, 13 and 14 are all about different topics and unrelated to the previous two topics mentioned above.

Solution 15 might be a good complement helping the goal behind solutions 1-8.

Well, doesn't look like an efficient way to discuss.

And then imagine that https support (solution 12) is under development and implemented one day. The way to communicate this is to move the brainstorm to In Development and then to Implemented. You can select the solutions implemented, sure, but again moving the brainstorm to Implemented when the biggest topic with solutions 1-8 is still open might be again not a good idea.

This is what I'm talking about, and we have the same problem in most of the brainstorm proposals currently in the top 10 of "popularity" at http://maemo.org/community/brainstorm/ ("Hot brainstorms"). Then you click on them and you realize that the popularity is due to the fact that they become cul-de-sac of 1001 slightly related ideas.

I have to admit... ^^^^ makes sense.

That helped. However, I continue to think that approach is philosophically valid. Again, it's a high-level problem that could be helped by myriad unrelated solutions.

But I'm still looking for a general proposal on how this process should be done. If we go to one solution per proposal, we'll see an explosion of proposals, many sharing enough attributes that they might all be addressed by one project-scale, high-level solution. We'd have a lot of proposals to stay on top of, and a lot more threads here (posts would likely be equal).

If we allow any multiple solutions per proposal at all, we're going to get the sort of situation we have now. It's no accidental coincidence that the problem you're citing, Quim, is common to the most popular proposals. There's a competition amongst solution creators. Collaboration could solve the problem but how do we help that happen?

So... how do we design our way out of this? And am I correct in assuming the instructions I originally created for the How To are totally wrong?