Drupal.org ideation tool implementation

added the meta as parent and tried to separate motivation from proposed resolutions.

It seems to me, that an idea in many cases will be related to something we already have. With that in mind, this repository of 'ideas' can enhance the input to both
core and contrib maintainers. I am thinking in terms of both metrics and relationships.

Relationships:

Duplicates
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If something is marked as a Duplicate, I would like to see a link to the original, which I'm sure has been thought of.
But, it seems that there are 2 sources of duplication. 1) A previous Idea -and- 2) an implemented module.
In either case, I would appreciate a reverse link on the original (idea or module) page that links back to ALL duplicates.

In the case of the idea, this gives more 'juice' to the original idea.
In the case of the module, 'juice' to the module and feedback to the maintainer.

Anytime something is marked as a duplicate, there is a chance that it wasn't. Similar but not the same. By providing the links from the Module back to all the duplicate ideas, we provide the maintainer a repository of restatements which can often open us up to additional points of view. As a programmer, it is important to get as many views / use cases as possible, and almost everything we write, we will all admit at some point can be improved. Providing the links on the Original BACK to all the restatments of the idea, could be a treasure trove to the maintainer.

Modules
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Any idea may be new, OR may be an enhancement to an existing core or contrib component. Where it is found that an idea is related to an existing module / feature / distro ...
It would again be good to create on that (module|feature|distro) page a link to all the ideas and duplicates associated with them. This again provides the maintainer with a wealth of viewpoints and feedback.

Metrics:

Once those back links are in place, this adds to the measurability for the original idea or module.
Since each idea can have subscribers or followers, the counts for these would provide more feedback to the maintainer.

In the end, I see this as providing conversation and feedback to any of the maintainers. Some will use it, some will cry that there is too much noise. But no one is forcing the maintainer to respond if they have lost interest or are too busy. For those that will use this additional feedback, I believe it would provide a rich repository of views towards improvements.

I believe there is a lot more to this, but I have already exceeded Crell's 5 paragraph limit.
More thought on my part is in order.

kvanderw, it sounds like you referring to ideas submitted about contrib modules or Drupal core development. This tool would only be for ideas for changes we make to drupal.org.

Outside tool is not a good idea for a few reasons:

• This won't be a one-off voting, as we did previously. This will be a tool used on an ongoing basis to help guide Drupal.org development.
• This tool will be a place for all feature requests scattered across 15 D.o related issue queues. We'll close feature requests there and ask people to open them in this tool. This brings us to the next point.
• Proposing an idea for Drupal.org should be *very* simple, people don't have to create an account on yet another site.
• The tool should be closely tied to Drupal.org to make people actually use it. This means Dashboard block, maybe sub-tab in their user profile.
• We might expand link filter to be able to use [#xxx] type links to issues on infra.d.o as well, which will never happen on outside tool. We might also get Druplicon to work with this tool, same as it does for the issue queues.
• The tool needs to match our desired workflow, have our desired fields and give us ability to use desired user permissions.
• Once the idea is "approved" it will move into the changes tool to track its implementation. The changes tool has matching fields and is (will be) located on infrastructure.drupal.org as well.
• We want the history of all discussions and data about peoples activity and participation on Drupal.org, aggregated into their user profile.
• Using the outside tool peoples profiles will be empty, unless they make sure to fill them up and provide links back to their Drupal.org profile. Makes it hard to see who is who, and look up people and details on their participation in the Drupal community.
• Lastly, when we used outside tool last time huge amount of people was extremely unhappy.

This is off top of my head. When I am not sleepy, I might articulate this better.

We did consider using Project module, however it's kind of too huge and has lot's of stuff we don't really need. It'll slow us down when we want to implement some changes to the tool.
We still will need to customize it. It has no voting, we probably will need specific user permissions for some fields.

By having the ideation tool as a custom content type and views we have an opportunity to play with the layout. If we use Project module, we're stuck with the issue queues table layout. Take a look at the proposed mockups, they display ideas in a totally different way from the issue queue. By being flexible and quickly changing this tool once we start using it, we might beta-test on it some ideas, which then can be brought into Project module and used for the issue queues as well.

Lastly, we will be implementing notifications system for the changes tool (which isn't powered by Project) based on some existing contrib module anyway. That system might as well take care of the notifications for the ideation tool.

I'm not familiar with what modules are already in use on D.O. but perhaps this install profile or some of its pre-built features could be used for the idea implementation. https://drupal.org/project/idea

Cleaning up DSWG issue queue. Closing since the tool implementation is not planned atm.