Reading how the different threads concerning bugs, ideas, evolutions and all matters of SP develop chaotically, this weird idea came to my mind...
Having worked in few IT companies and seen how they work, I'm more and more aware of the similarity of SP with any IT product, apart from the fact SP is non-profit.
There should be a system that should allow:
- Post ideas individually. Duplicates not allowed
- Leave ideas during an incubation stage during which people could comment, vote, etc etc
- After the incubation stage is over, and depending on the result, successful or not, the developer's board validate it or not.
- The developers estimate it: is it a lot of work ? Is it worth doing it ? Depending on the ratio between the cost in time and the greatness of the idea, it is placed in the task list with a defined degree of priority.
- Bugs can be posted identically as ideas in a bugs category, without the incubation stage. The board decides if it is a bug or not. Depending on the workload the priority is given.
- When a task is about to start it is allocated to someone. Ex: design to Josh, votes algorithms to MrChad (he isn't a developer but he can for example find some new formula on the paper...), code development to Matt Montana, MVS or any other if there are (ok, I know so far there is only Matt... but who knows in the future...)
In my opinion too many interesting ideas are posted and ignored during the hubbub of current thread discussions, important topics are discussed too chaotically. This would n my opinion give a new impulse to SP, and make SP3 a collaborative site in all senses of the term: constantly improving, basing on the ideas of its own members, and not stagnating during a decade like SP2 did.
How to realize this now ? We would need to find some web-based bug-tracking application free of license. Some of them are not free, but perhaps affordable for SP. I have Jira in my mind, but I'm sure there are many others... Then we would need to append it to the site, like the forum.