[Grassroots-l] Is this the "Idea Funnel?"

[Sameer Verma]

Bryan Berry wrote:
> Some time ago Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote about the challenges of
> harnessing the ideas of an open-source community and focusing its
> collective energies
> http://gregdek.livejournal.com/30505.html
>
> Yesterday I came upon Idea Torrent www.ideatorrent.org , used by Ubuntu
> Brainstorm, which seems to embody the ideas that Greg espouses.
>
> Could be quite useful for the OLPC community
>
>   

IdeaTorrent/Ubuntu Brainstorm is a neat project. It is simple and easy
to use. What matters though is that once such a mechanism is in place,
people who propose and/or vote should be as diverse as possible,
otherwise we get a bunch of developers who pat each other's back (self
selection bias). I still feel that this project does not involve enough
educators. That's where majority of the ideas should come from.
Educators know challenges in the classroom firsthand. They also know
what works. So, in implementing ideatorrent or some such thing, the
barrier to entry for an educator should be minimal.

Once a project gets a lot of votes, the next step becomes crucial. How
does an idea become a project? Who takes it on? etc. That workflow must
be established as well.

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/