Ubuntu to stop Brainstorm

The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided, at its most recent meeting, to finally abandon the Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas site. The site was created in 2008 to bring together the community and developers on a collaborative crowd-sourced platform where problems could be posed, ideas for solving the problems offered and users could vote on preferred solutions. If solutions were popular they could find themselves implemented by Canonical or Ubuntu teams.

It appears that the interest in the site has fallen according to the Technical Board who cite a decrease in answers from Ubuntu developers and a decreasing number of votes from users. Described as a "nest of unmaintainedness", the site's sole maintainer, Stéphane Graber, admitted that he only signed on to "purge some data after IS assigned some tickets to me". Martin Pitt, chairing the meeting, said it was not surprising given how Ubuntu's design process had changed over the years. Canonical have brought more design, and design decisions, in-house or within groups of select external developers, adopting a more traditional finished-product/customer-comments model for its design feedback.

The site was managed by the Ubuntu Community QA Team which also created it and the QA Team's representatives and Graber agreed with the proposal to shutter the site and end regular review of its contents. The QA Team are to investigate whether the site can be left online in a read only state and "otherwise shut it down".

While Brainstorm is being closed down, the Ubuntu.com design team announced that the Community button, which had been removed from the sites top menu to a footer, much to the chagrin of some community members, will be restored to a new top menu bar that sits above the current top menu. The design team explain that the removal was part of a renewal process which is to apply to all the Ubuntu web properties and therefore had to be taken on in stages. The new menu system will roll out at the end of the month.

(djwm)