Opening Remarks from the Community Representative ...
Thank you Charles for inviting me to be the
Community Representative. I am happy to quarter back this process and deliver the User Community's collective decision regarding the first feature to be developed.
As I am charting new territory here ... I don't know of any other vendors offering this kind of formal channel for their User Community ... so I suspect we will not get it all right the very first time.
Hence my approach is to invite all users to not only make their suggestions for Candidate Feature #1 but also provide suggestions for the effective and efficient process of selecting it.
I propose that we do it in 3 stages ...
a) A week long open period of acceptance of suggestions.
b) Close the cycle to any additional suggestions until the next cycle ... and discuss the merits of suggestions and perhaps make additional comments about fine tuning the feature details.
c) Close discussions and conduct the Voting Process ... I will then present the details to the ZOHO Creator Team.
I also propose that we keep everything about the first cycle simple and straight forward. Then we apply our experience to refine the process for the next cycle.
To that end, I suggest that each person limit themselves to their top 3 suggestions ... and that we go for "features that can be developed/delivered in short order" ... a kind of beta test for the process itself ... of course this is a Community driven process and these are just my suggestions for reaping the most benefits in an efficient and effective manner.
In order to organize/manage this process, I suggest that each suggestion be started as a new post ... and subsequent posts be strictly confined to discussion of the suggestion in the first post ... in other words no hijacking/forking of discussion threads.
The person suggesting the feature should use this forum to convince the others of the merits of his/her suggestion ... while we all have our own pet-projects, I suggest that we think in terms of the "feature that will provide the most benefit to the most number of users for the least amount of development" ... a kind of "highest ROI" consideration ... of course this is just my own view on this.
There have been some comments made regarding who should be able to vote and how many votes does one user get. I believe we can discuss this concurrently with the first two stages of this cycle ... but perhaps for cycle #1, we can just have people vote in a post I will set up at the right time ... and we can use this experience to determine the refinement of this process in subsequent cycles ... as you might tell, I am a fan of the "continuous improvement process"
.
So, put on your thinking caps ... pick your best suggestions ... and make a compelling case why it should be feature #1.
I am going to take a few days to go through my posts here ... and extract all the suggestions I made in the last six months since v3.0. ... so I can make my best 3 suggestions.
Finally, thank you to the ZOHO Creator Team for listening to their User Community and offering to set up this mechanism for channeling User Suggested features.
Gaev
As I am charting new territory here ... I don't know of any other vendors offering this kind of formal channel for their User Community ... so I suspect we will not get it all right the very first time.
Hence my approach is to invite all users to not only make their suggestions for Candidate Feature #1 but also provide suggestions for the effective and efficient process of selecting it.
I propose that we do it in 3 stages ...
a) A week long open period of acceptance of suggestions.
b) Close the cycle to any additional suggestions until the next cycle ... and discuss the merits of suggestions and perhaps make additional comments about fine tuning the feature details.
c) Close discussions and conduct the Voting Process ... I will then present the details to the ZOHO Creator Team.
I also propose that we keep everything about the first cycle simple and straight forward. Then we apply our experience to refine the process for the next cycle.
To that end, I suggest that each person limit themselves to their top 3 suggestions ... and that we go for "features that can be developed/delivered in short order" ... a kind of beta test for the process itself ... of course this is a Community driven process and these are just my suggestions for reaping the most benefits in an efficient and effective manner.
In order to organize/manage this process, I suggest that each suggestion be started as a new post ... and subsequent posts be strictly confined to discussion of the suggestion in the first post ... in other words no hijacking/forking of discussion threads.
The person suggesting the feature should use this forum to convince the others of the merits of his/her suggestion ... while we all have our own pet-projects, I suggest that we think in terms of the "feature that will provide the most benefit to the most number of users for the least amount of development" ... a kind of "highest ROI" consideration ... of course this is just my own view on this.
There have been some comments made regarding who should be able to vote and how many votes does one user get. I believe we can discuss this concurrently with the first two stages of this cycle ... but perhaps for cycle #1, we can just have people vote in a post I will set up at the right time ... and we can use this experience to determine the refinement of this process in subsequent cycles ... as you might tell, I am a fan of the "continuous improvement process"
.So, put on your thinking caps ... pick your best suggestions ... and make a compelling case why it should be feature #1.
I am going to take a few days to go through my posts here ... and extract all the suggestions I made in the last six months since v3.0. ... so I can make my best 3 suggestions.
Finally, thank you to the ZOHO Creator Team for listening to their User Community and offering to set up this mechanism for channeling User Suggested features.
Gaev