joewiz wrote:The forum is active but is very disorganized, and discrete feature requests/ideas/bugs are hard to track. Users feel their passionate contributions go unheard. The collective wisdom and passion is not being properly or productively channelled.
joe, I believe that you have succinctly captured the essence of the problem, at least as I see it.
I also like your idea of the democratic 'voting' system for feature requests, a la Hogbay. This is one such way of skinning the cat (so to speak), and a seemingly good one at that.
I suggest that, at the very least, and sooner rather than later, Redlers need to split the forum into some meaningful sub-branches, rather than just one "Mellel" forum.
Some other things that we need to agree on, or have Redlers make a decision on...
• Is a forum-based discussion ample? Or do we need an interactive, 'real-time' iChat style discussion as well?
• What would be the topics for discussion? How many would be constitute a manageable number of topics?
• What sort of commitment should Redlers make (or could they make) to implementation? It seems to me, that we need some kind of formal communication back from Redlers as an output of this process. e.g. like a development plan, with some timeline. But I don't know how willing Redlers will be to disclose too many of their trade secrets.
Hence,
• Clarity from Redlers as to exactly what they will commit to.
Nick