Concrete things that could be done:

- Remove the irrelevant stickies in this forum and clean the ones staying.

- Review, polish and complete http://wiki.maemo.org/Brainstorm if you think it's not clear enough.

- Agree on a policy for "meta-brainstorms". I have a concrete problem with the Ovi Maps improvements brainstorm: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...386#post495386

- Prioritize the Brainstorm bugs and chase Oskari to fix the ones blocking us now.

There is always a way to make the tools work at your will. The problem we have now is not only because the tools don't do exactly what we want, but because we don't have one single opinion about the process and the tools to make it work.

It can be solved!

as long as we do not have the powers to move stuff around in brainstorm there will remain some of our problems, if stuff does not happen automagickly we need the possibility to do it by hand, at least. Voted at bugs...
Cleaned "Brainstorm News" (moved posts to new thread in Archive:News) and closed the thread, only mods are able to post there. What about http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33222 the "ask your questions here" sticky, should it be closed and moved to archives? Clean up and start from new?

For now I just delete entries not related and not useful for anyone from any thread. "Reason: noise", should I move them instead? is there a /dev/null? they still show up for moderators as "deleted" and might be moved to some dark place...

You wrote in this post:

In my opinion the biggest problem on the actually Brainstorm system is, the users understood the Brainstorming process different than the developers.

They understood a Brainstorm only as a Group of Ideas. Not a Idea and possible Solutions for this single one.

In my Posts #54 and #61 here in this tread I tryed to figure out how the system should work.
The Point: When you're finishing a Brainstorm in real life. You have always to made the decitions on a Idea (Solution) level. So the Brainstorm system and the workflow should work the same way.

So, when you're moving this OVI Maps meta brainstorm to under development you should decide on a solution level. Take every single solution and mark them as "under development", "rejected (because of)", "waiting (later to decide)", "blocking of #2" or something else.
I know, the Brainstorm system doesn't work this way at the moment. But in my opinion it should work like a fast Brainstorming in real life. Spit out a lot of Ideas. And at the end, take them all and look at it: "what should we keep and what's waste?" - And we should handle it this way, too.

A fast workaround for now could be the possibility for the moderators to split Brainstorms in several small Brainstorms and move the Solutions from one to a another Brainstorm with all Votes. (Moderators: Dont forget! There should be a Link in the old Brainstorm, redirecting the users to the new location!)

But, in my opinion this isn't a solution. What will we have in the end?
Millions of small Brainstorms, without any context to each other and on every single Brainstorm only the Solutions: "Nokia should do it", "The Community can do it", "We don't need it". An the Brainstorm itself is only: "Put the Button on the left instead of the right."


What do you think? Texrat commented this very positive. But I guess you're opinion is on this Topic essential. And there was no feedback from you.

Could a solutions based handling solve your problem with such large, out of control mass meta Brainstorms?

Can we handle it currently this way when you move it to "under development", block the posibility to edit it by the users and add the Comments / Decisions by the Developers in Bold to the Solutions which one is how handled?

We need a good workaround until we have a better working Brainstorm system.

I think I wrote somewhere that in my opinion brainstorms must be precise in order to be operative, more or less like bug reports. One brainstorm for one feature.

You say this ends up in thousands of brainstorms. I don't have a problem with this as long as those thousands of brainstorm have concrete solutions and focused discussions. There are ways to search what is interesting to you or to me.

By using meta brainstorms we end up with massive collections of mixed solutions and threads with hundreds of posts. Not much improvement compared to regular forum threads, if you ask me.

One of the reasons to defend meta-brainstorms is that they are the "real" brainstorms with a topic open and the possibility to list and vote just any idea. In my opinion such creative entropy is already provided by this forum. the evaluation of interest is also measured by the fact that plenty ideas jjst come and go, while others come back, persist, evetually get a focused discussion and someone willing to push them and get some tangible result out of them.

The brainstorm tool was not thought for meta-bugs. Now we have most of the top positions taken by the 6 more popular apps. The lack of a "Browser improvements" metabrainstorm can be probably interpreted as a proof that users are really happy with it. And we start having weird problems with duplicated. For instance: what to do with the solutions about Calendar-Contacts integration that can be found in a metabrainstorm and a specific brainstorm?

Having meta-brainstorms is probably an indirect way to stop the creation of specific brainstorms in that area since they might look like duplicates of sorts.

It's often hard to have a problem with something that hasn't happened yet, Quim.

I am very certain that soon after we move to a one-to-one model, that problem will manifest itself in quick and ugly fashion.

But as I said before I'll get on board for now. My certainty does not automatically translate to fact, and I could very well be unnecessarily concerned.

Regardless, I'm still designing an alternative best-case scenario. It's just taking a while.

Quim is making a lot of sense here. We only complicate our lives by trying to make a task-oriented tool like brainstorm into a freesketch notepad. Computers and databases excel at ordering and tracking and sorting a multitude of well-defined entries, but not so much when the structure of the entries is arbitrary.

I'm in favor of using a scalpel here. Keep brainstorms about a single problem, with a number of equally focused solutions. That has the added benefit of requiring the creator of the entry to clearly define the problem so that the whole process will proceed more smoothly.

I wouldn't worry about losing solutions. The good thing about solutions in our Brainstorm is that the owner of the solution will take care of it: he'll be an advocate of the solution wherever it is useful.

At the risk of being pedantic: the discussion is moving the tool away from true brainstorming. If brainstorming-to-solutions is not our actual goal, then changing the name would clarify the purpose.

Oh, and I sure hope no one thinks I was in any way advocating a "free sketch notepad". Quite the opposite at the solution side.

I'm not attached to the name. t.m.o is a brainstorm, so we can call what bubbles up into the "Brainstorm" tool whatever you like.

I think we need to be careful not to lose track of the goal. Are we trying to provide a tool to propose and manage and direct improvements as a community? Or a way to discuss them? We've got the latter in t.m.o. We need an effective former.

I'm convinced we're doing it wrong altogether. As I proposed before: use THIS subforum as the noisy Brainstorm portion, where proposals/ideas/solutions are kicked around until something useful emerges. THEN ferry that result over to the actual Brainstorm tool.

tmo subforum: Forming/Storming
Brainstorm tool: Norming/Performing

I've lost track of why we're doing it the way we're doing it, and what we were doing before, but that sounds ok. Just as long as what goes into the Brainstorm tool is incisively defined and focused... i have my doubts that can happen without requiring a "dress rehearsal" in the subforum (and iirc that's why we're doing it the way we are now). The problem is that things are largely out of our hands once people take it to the Brainstorm tool. When i think about solutions i always come back to the need for "Brainstorm champions" that actually make and maintain the proposals to maintain some degree of order in the tool.