Ah, we’re not talking about the same noise. I was talking about minimizing the number of proposals that are bad for some reason (e.g. incomplete, or not useful for users, or not aligned with Mozilla’s mission) and that Product Management would have to read through.
Can Discourse be configured for something a bit more sophisticated than Like? i.e. voting on several criteria?
I didn’t know that Discourse could do that. I believe that this would be useful.
It would be possible with a plugin. What type/range of criteria were you thinking of?
I don’t think it’s quite as fine grained as use being able to control who can like or not, but we can definitely restrict who can post, reply or see in a category.
I think that if you can post, you can like.
Question: What’s the lightest weight, fastest, simplest and most data driven way to test this idea?
I ask because I don’t think the tool or process matters much at this point – or at least it’s certainly way less important than testing the benefits and efficacy of the core idea:
- making Mozilla more visibly transparent;
- improving morale;
- improving community interactions;
- surfacing good ideas;
- surfacing ideas specific to locales that are not currently represented by Product Management (i.e. most of the world).
All of these are totally unproven. And we can’t prove them through thinking them out. So let’s find a way to test them, quickly, and with minimum effort.
I think previous suggestions are super quick (we already have the tool and requires 0 development), a Discourse category where anyone can read but only vouched mozillians group can create a topic and like other topics.
We would just need to write a template an set it as pinned topic there on what the topic should include, like a clear topic subject and a few lines explaining it in the body.
OK, probably we would just need to apply something like this to sort by likes:
And we can just show open topics, so once something is implemented or discarded the topic can be closed and won’t be displayed.
Edit: This is exactly how the Discourse dev team gathers feature requests from forum users:
I don’t think testing the tool or an open process is what we need to test. I think we need to test, narrowly, the concept of Mozillians providing product ideas, and product teams sifting through those for value.
Here’s what that would look like to me:
Yes, I agree, I was just commenting on how we can test that voting process with almost no effort with the current tools we have right now. Maybe in the future we decide to use other tool or just discard everything because it wasn’t a success.
This is an interesting point. We have to assume that the majority of proposals are not going to be adopted. Will enough be adopted that people will get the morale boost from knowing that the community at large was listened to and gets a say?
Regarding collecting the ideas, I believe you’re saying not to solicit more ideas, but to approach people who have already made suggestions and invite them to participate in the trial. That way we can compare if they felt more satisfied with the proposal process or if they feel like it ends up being more hoops to jump through to still get turned down.
On the product team side, I’m curious what the current process is for deciding what to work on. Is the current process very similar to the proposal, but is mostly done internally? Or is it done in a totally different way? It could be that for the teams this would also be an experiment in using proposals at all.
Then we should clarify very well that having a proposal with a lot of support doesn’t mean that it’s going to be implemented, but we should make sure that at least they are evaluated from the product side and for the “highly supported” ones at least a reply from the team about the decision.
@george how easy do you see to have this kind of support from product side?
My guess is that the product people would be open to this, if we could help
frame it in a lightweight way for them.
So, what would be the next steps for this? Define a proposal draft with the concept of Mozillians providing ideas and product teams checking them?
I think the next step would be to find a product team willing to participate. Without that, everything else is moot.
This initiative seems to have gone dormant 
I think we’ll need a champion to lead this and work with all stakeholders (specially product teams) to frame the conversation.
Who has time and want to lead this?
Hi
I really like this idea and I agree with @majken that getting support from the product teams is vital. They often have roadmaps already in place for future releases, but they may find this process useful for a) helping to prioritise and b) for new ideas that are currently off the plan.
I also agree with point made by @yoric that it would get the community more involved. If you think of the vouched Mozillian community as “super users” we are in a good place to help guide Mozilla software development. Just think of the range of possible areas from coding to GUI that contributors could have ideas in relation to.
Let us not get too carried away though. The idea of a trial process makes a lot of sense, but I would suggest that it is limited to one product (for example Firefox for Android) so that the trial can work with, and get feedback from, one product team. This will give good feedback to either build on this for a possible wider role out. As with any good idea, people need to appreciate that this channel/forum/thing may not work - failure is not bad, it just means people need to find a different approach.
As someone that is a member of the vouched Mozillian community and has no coding skills, but who has experience of pitching good ideas in a non IT setting, I may be willing to help wrangle this, however, I would need to hold fire on doing anything until mid-May at the earliest due to other (non Mozilla/SUMO) volunteering commitments.
Actually, I would start by limiting it even more, to one feature: WebExtension APIs. This limits the (test) audience to add-on developers, who may have considerable interest in seeing APIs progress in directions that match their needs.
As a side-note, I’m currently writing a blog entry on many things, including the need for such a channel.
I don’t know where to submit suggestions now.
I wanted to propose the idea of co-browsing, … . that is, browsing the web and having a second person sort of on your shoulder watching and commenting as you go. Lots of people shop that way in real life.
Hi @wade.schuette. For the moment, I believe that the best place to suggest new features is Test Pilot. Incidentally, I believe that we already had a prototype of this feature, so it might not be too hard to reactivate 
As a side-note, I have chatted recently with @george. Apparently, the idea of creating a channel for suggesting new features is still valid, and @mhenretty is working on it at the moment. Stay tuned!