Future of Brainstorm
A few days ago in Brilliant Brainstorms #9 I suggested, jokingly, that the Brainstorm developers read my posts. I was surprised to learn that at least one of them, Nicolas Deschildre, does read my posts. In the comment was a link to a post on Nicolas Deschildre’s blog presenting an idea called “decentralized Brainstorm.” If you have not seen the post before, I highly recommend you check it out and then come back. To summarize, the idea is that different projects’ Brainstorm sites can talk to each other and exchange ideas. This post, along with some other ideas I have seen, got me thinking about the future of Brainstorm and the future of open-source development.
First, I think it would be great to integrate Brainstorm into the rest of the open-source development tools. Since Ubuntu created Brainstorm and they use Launchpad, I will use Launchpad as an example. Launchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is a system for open-source projects to collaborate on code, feature planning, bug reporting/fixing, translations, and so on. Canonical could integrate Brainstorm into Launchpad, making it easy for all projects to have their own Brainstorm-like site. Additionally, as suggested by Idea #8338 on Ubuntu Brainstorm, some of the ideas behind Brainstorm could go into other parts of Launchpad. For example, the ability to vote on the importance of bugs might be added.
Once a standard system incorporating Brainstorm and other parts of projects is set up, Nicolas Deschildre’s idea about connecting different Brainstorm sites could be put into place. All of this would ease the flow of ideas into and between open-source projects, hopefully, eventually making it so the users, even if they have no development experience, can be part of deciding what the features each release should focus on.
On the developer side of things, this linking of Brainstorm sites with each other and with development tools could really change how things work. Now, a volunteer developer might join one, or possibly two, projects and work on only those projects. Certainly there would still be people like this, but there could also be developers who moved from project to project, implementing the ideas they were interested in, no matter what project that idea was part of.
Although this interconnected web of ideas and development is certainly not a reality yet, I think this, or something like this, may be the future of open-source development. Certainly Brainstorm has unlocked a lot of the potential of free software to be created by the users, and I hope that this idea, or a similar one, will unlock even more of that potential.
I will be very curious to see how those who know more about the development process react to this ideas. Do you think the future of open-source development holds something similar to this?
