Well said. I would love to be in position to ask the community for what feature one single developer payed by the community would focus on. We do not have this luxury. Stef On Dec 9, 2010, at 11:48 AM, Geert Claes wrote:
Hi Andres, I understood from your previous post that you are in favour of a crowdsourcing/brainstorming approach like UserVoice, IdeaTorrent (OLPC, Ubuntu ...), IdeaScale, etc, but please do keep in mind that the Pharo community is still a very small community that relies on a relatively small number of contributors. From the Pharo-Project.org website: "All the discussions about Pharo's direction are open and occur on the mailing list. Everything is transparent and will remain so." so ideas and suggestions from both seasoned Pharoers as well as newcomers are always welcome and nobody's voice is ever or has ever been banned.
You mentioned in your post as disadvantages of a voting system that "if you don't have enough population the requests may not reflect the real community needs, as a dev team you may end up implementing something you don't consider relevant.". The problem is not necessarily the voting aspect, but the fact that the Pharo project doesn't really have a "dev-team" as such. The Pharo project consists of a number of contributors who fix and add things mainly because they want and need these things themselves and in doing so contribute to a better Pharo system.
I am a bit confused as to what exactly you are suggesting because if (for argument's sake) Pharo were to setup an IdeaTorrent. Lets say certain ideas receive a number of votes and as a result they are then considered "popular". Since the Pharo project does not have a real "dev-team" that can be told what to do, who will be implementing these "popular" ideas? What if contributors (who sacrifice their own free-time) choose to fix or implement valuable aspects (which did not receive as many votes) and ignore the most "popular" ideas? As a side-note: giving people more votes (or allowing to vote against ideas) has a history of causing a lot of drama and add no value :)
When you were talking about what "rights" anyone has in the Pharo community, I think the best way to put it (feel free to correct me) is probably that "nobody has the right to tell someone else what to do or not to do" and that "everybody has the right and is encouraged to contribute". The only time the Pharo board will step in is when the community can't reach a consensus.
Anyhow, nobody is saying that your idea of a voting system is bad, its just that for such a system to work, the project would need the resources to tackle these top ideas and as it stand this is unfortunately not the case. Pharo has come a long way in two years and its still moving strong :)
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