The Ubuntu Brainstorm staff are looking for potential candidates for the reviewer team. I'll try to give an overview of the basics that you might wish to know about. For any other question that comes to your mind, find us at #ubuntu-brainstorm (irc.freenode.net) on IRC or send a mail to our mailing list.

Observing the current trends and workload, we feel that there is a need for more idea reviewers. Therefore, we are looking for Brainstorm users who would be willing to volunteer for the same.

Brainstorm idea reviewers' group is a part of the Ubuntu Brainstorm Moderator team. They are responsible for performing an initial screening of ideas inside the Idea Sandbox before they are sent to the Popular Ideas section. Idea Reviewers participate in all activities on the team mailing list and at our IRC channel #ubuntu-brainstorm (freenode).

Mainly, you would need to check whether an idea follows the posting guidelines, it isn't a bug or a packaging request, and that it hasn't been posted before. You would be having a number of moderator tools to help you with the job. You can find more guidelines at the wiki page.

Drop in a mail at our mailing list: brainstorm-moderators [AT] lists.ubuntu.com

Make sure you include your Brainstorm username so that we can take a quick look at your activity so far. The team would be mainly looking for users who know how brainstorm works and how things are done (you can always choose to have a mentor who can help you with everything). Once the team is happy, you will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.

EDIT2: already 15 new moderators in a few hours! From now on, only persons with a good moderation experience will be accepted.

Hi,

As you may have heard, the next version of Ubuntu Brainstorm (which can be seen at http://devel.ideatorrent.org/) will come around October. One of the main targets of this update will be to enhance the ideas quality.
As such, one of the upcoming features will be the Idea sandbox, an area where new ideas will be reviewed by moderators before going mainstream.

Want to help? Join Ubuntu Brainstorm as a moderator!
Only a few minutes per day is necessary. Anyone can join, just send a mail on this launchpad team mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~brainstorm-moderators. (EDIT: Please send a mail to the team mailing list before applying to the team!)

Your job will be to review ideas in the Idea sandbox, to help authors to structure them, and to approve/reject them. Once an idea gets a given number of approvals, the idea will go mainstream. You will also be able to edit ideas, to improve idea quality.
If you had some significant previous moderation experience, you will be granted additional moderators tools.

Interested but not sure? Join #ubuntu-brainstorm on IRC!

A major evolution of Ubuntu Brainstorm is on the way, and includes:

• An UI redesign, for better navigation through projects and categories.
• Idea rationale & solution separation, with the ability to add your solution to an existing idea rationale. That will help have a better visibility by gathering ideas tackling the same problem.
• Approval required for newly submitted ideas. That will help make Ubuntu Brainstorm content consistent by filtering the non-ideas, duplicates and poorly described ideas.
• Custom permissions for project administrators. Upstream and Ubuntu developers could, if they want, ask to add their project and manage ideas related to their project.
• And much more...

I'm happy to announce that it's reaching a usable state, and is available for open testing on http://devel.ideatorrent.org. You can use your current Brainstorm login if older than the 23th June. (Warning: test server with limited resources).

Indeed, a lot of changes were done, and I'd like to test it thoroughly before going live (which I don't expect before a month). So you are welcome to post test content, vote, and report any error you find on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ideatorrent/+filebug. Discussion and suggestion about the new UI can take place in this ubuntuforums.org thread. (Note: This is a test setup, meaning that all your interactions will be removed at next code update)

Thanks for your help!

First million votes

Already one million votes have been cast on ideas by Ubuntu users! Whoah!

Call for moderators for project-specific Brainstorm frontends

At the moment, ideas at Ubuntu Brainstorm can concern any project, Ubuntu-related or upstream. That's nice, but as a project maintainer, you may want more visibility with a part of the website dedicated to your project and an easier way to deal with your ideas, by having some control over them.

That's what is coming next! If you are willing to moderate it, you can ask for a brainstorm.ubuntu.com/project_name/ area. This "subsection" will be like the current Brainstorm site, and use the same idea database, but ideas will be filtered by your project - it's basically a Brainstorm frontend for your project.

If you are interested, you can ask for it for the next update on the mailing list or in IRC (#ubuntu-testing). So who wants a Xubuntu or Kubuntu Brainstorm frontend? :)

Ideas XML export

Of course, for project maintainers who are interested in the feedback and who want to use their own tools, an idea XML export will be provided at the next update.

Ubuntu developer Martin Pitt (pitti on irc) has responded to some of your ideas:

Idea #3916: Easy file sharing between local users
Idea #3859: Warn on shutdown when multiple users logged in
Idea #4347: gksudo if I try to do an action I don't have access to
Idea #190: work on printer drivers
Idea #316: Codec Manager
Idea #4354: Tease programming on Ubuntu
Idea #5682: Password strength
Idea #214: Easy (GUI) creation and handling of encrypted partitions
Idea #5390: Offer to create a separate /home partition and use existing ones

Hi!

Here is some new stuff on Ubuntu Brainstorm:

Assigning ideas to a project You can now link ideas to projects. Projects include of course software projects, but also Ubuntu websites, and Ubuntu editions! That will make the job easier for people tracking ideas for their favorite projects. Now I recommend every idea authors to review their ideas and link them to a project! This feature is the first step before we can make the project-specific sub-brainstorm websites.
Tags It was a long standing popular request : you can now tag an idea. Mark ideas with your own tags, and make groups of related ideas!
Contact a Brainstormer You have seen people willing to work on an idea, and you want to participate too? As requested by this idea, you can now contact each others using the "contact" area in the user page. Note that you can forbid people to send you messages by going to your dashboard and changing the relevant option.
Faster Brainstorm On the overall, you should find Brainstorm faster. The only exception is the search function, which has an hard time looking at all your ideas! That should be fixed in the next update.

Mirco Muller, Ubuntu "bling" expert, has written in some responses to some Brainstorm ideas:

• Fix compatibility with webcams and microphone
• Include Compiz Fusion Manager by default
• Make it possible to mark applications "Disable Compiz when running"
• Create a standard gaming environment for ubuntu
• Partner with big name game developers
• Alt+Tab from fullscreen apps

Three months after the launch, it was time to do a small recap and lay out the plans for the next months.

At the moment, we can say that we have reached one of our goals: we are getting lots of feedback from you, and we are thankful! What an amazing community! We are now working towards a better feedback to your input : Starting this cycle, there should be some regular developer feedback on popular ideas, directly on the idea page, or on this blog, such as the latest three developer responses. You are developer and want to comment ideas? Please follow these directions.

In the next months, the work will be focused on an easier classification of ideas in projects, so that it can be exploited by non-Ubuntu software developers. Some possibilities include :

• assigning an idea to a project.
• searching by project.
• moderation of ideas by the project's software developers.
• the creation of sub-brainstorm websites ([project_name].brainstorm.ubuntu.com), which would use the same Brainstorm database, but with ideas filtered by project.

Also coming is an easy way for Brainstorm users to contact each other, tools for Ubuntu developers to spot and keep track of the interesting ideas, and in the long rung, we are heading towards a project neutral release, but don't expect it too soon.

Finally, there may be some more features, but it's up to you, contributors, to start participating in Brainstorm development by working on one of these mentored tasks :)

Font expert Arne Goetje writes in about brainstorm idea 303:

While this is certainly a nice idea, I'm afraid we won't see this kind of GUI any time soon. The reason for this is, that font management on Linux systems is a very complex issue if you care about all kind of applications being able to use the fonts. We will have to be able to deal with dozens of incompatible font formats and at least the same amount of ways to configure them and different locations to install them in, depending on the application you want to use them with.