[Sugar-devel] community influence on development

[Caroline Meeks]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 14:24, Greg Smith<gregsmithpm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Tomeu,
> >
> > Thanks for the feedback.
> >
> > On this:
> >>> I'm working on the GPA list (see:
> >>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Gardner_Pilot_Academy). If others have
> >>> lists of requirements, send them out. Then perhaps Simon, Tomeu et al
> >>> can link to them from some Roadmap creation page. We may be further
> >>> along than we think.
> >>
> >> What about entering Feature pages? Or is that intended to happen only
> >> once we have a technical plan for the feature?
> >>
> >> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Policy
> >
> > I would enter a feature before there's an agreed technical design. I
> > try to start with requirements saying what the user needs to do
> > abstracted from the technology (e.g. user wants to write a weekly
> > assignment and keep it in a "notebook" which their teacher can see as
> > well). I just haven't decided yet which are the most important
> > features for GPA, aside from Back up and Restore which I did create.
>
> So we need a place to collect deployment needs separate from the
> features process? Would be trac a good place for that?


I vote no. I don't think Trac is not a good solution for nondevelopers.  I
recently saw uservoice.com a web2.0 site for this problem and it seems to
have a lot of advantages over Trac.

Here are what I see as the issues with Trac.


   - Its slow
   - It requires login.  when I am in a classroom with 20 kids I want to be
   able to use any computer to put down an in the moment note.
   - Its hard to search trac. Its slow. It only shows a few results. its
   hard to sort the results.  The nice AJAX UI on uservoices makes it so much
   easier to see if I'm entering a duplicate issue.
   - there is no way easily say +1 or vote for something. Its a big
   committment to log in and comment.  We really need to know what issues
   appeal to a wide audiance. We want to lower the barrier to saying +1.
   - Trac asks questions nondevelopers don't know the answer to.  For some
   personality types they just stop when they can't answer a question, like
   what release or what component or is it a bug or feature.  We want to make
   it easy for people in the field to talk to us, the drop downs in Trac, even
   when not required, act as a barrier.
   - We want to enable and encourage chit chat about bugs, features, ideas


I don't know if uservoice is the right solution for us. But when I used it,
it helped me see why Trac wasn't working for us.

This is the product I used uservoice with:
http://gtdinbox.uservoice.com/pages/17178-general



>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Greg S
> >
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>



-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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