Today Ubuntu announced something that I have thought they should do for a while and it is called Ubuntu Brainstorm. Brainstorm is essentially Dell’s IdeaStorm for Ubuntu. If you are not familiar with how IdeaStorm works, the basic idea is that customers/users submit ideas and other customers/users comment on them and vote them up or down. IdeaStorm has been sucessful in bringing a number of changes to Dell products, including adding Ubuntu as a pre-installed option, so if it worked that well for a big company, chances are it will work even better for an open-source project.

While open-source is always about the users contributing to the project, there has never been a great way for an average, non-technical user to share their ideas with the community, until now. Brainstorm will hopefully become a place where Ubuntu developers can see what users want and work to implement those features. I could go on to talk about how great this idea is for a long time, but instead I am going to talk about two features of Brainstorm that can help make it not just another way of gathering feedback, but the central place for feedback and new ideas.

First is the ability to “attach” a forum thread, Bugzilla bug, or Launchpad blueprint that is related to the same idea. This makes Brainstorm a place for all the information about a particular feature to be collected and also makes it easy to migrate future features that were being discussed elsewhere into Brainstorm.

The second feature is the ability to add a button to a website that promotes a particular idea. For example, if I think a particular idea is good and I want to promote it on my site, I can put something like this up:

How can this help make Brainstorm the central place for new ideas? This allows people to tie other discussion or talk about a feature back to Brainstorm.

Because of this easy way of connecting Brainstorm to other resources and of connecting other resources to Brainstorm, Brainstorm really has a chance to become the perfect central site for charting future directions for Ubuntu. Sure you could do all this manually, but these features just make it easier and smoother.