OStatic

Brainstorm combines the typical idea of issue-tracking with Digg-like social networking features. Anyone can create an account with Ubuntu QA to participate. Once you're logged in, you can submit an idea to the Ubuntu QA team by giving it a title and explaining what you want changed or implemented. But, more crucially, you can also participate in the brainstorm process, voting ideas up or down and adding to the per-idea comment thread. Ideas can also be linked to other parts of the Ubuntu QA system so their progress towards implementation can be tracked.

The end result is a site where - hopefully - the most important features and most critical bugs (as measured by the Ubuntu community of users, not just developers) will bubble to the top. Already, less than a week after launch, numerous ideas have been moved to the "being worked on" list, while others are already marked "implemented" (the bulk of these being pre-existing features that people just had trouble finding).

Not every open-source project will want this level of community participation, of course. In particular, many projects are driven by the vision of a single lead developer, who has a roadmap of features in mind. But for software that can afford the effort, Ubuntu Brainstorm shows a way that even non-technical and business users can have an influence on the future. In a world where development is open, it only makes sense to open the design process as well.

• ubuntu
• linux
• qa