Luke Macken and I had a little mini hackfest today on improving collaboration in Fedora. This is an idea we came up with this afternoon and I mocked up most of it on the bus ride home tonight. (A 2-hour bus ride home as the post-Boston-flood road conditions and traffic during rush hour were really bad tonight.) Luke already has a working prototype 🙂

What do you think? The Inkscape source is of course available so please feel free to try out your own ideas and play away and bounce them back! These are some random, off-the-cuff points about some of the ideas behind the mockups to help give some context. I’m likely missing a lot of good points here so I apologize in advance for my sloppiness:

threads are flattened to one level to make it simpler to follow

both the number of participants and number of comments are noted

posts have ratings to discourage one-liner “me toos” replies and also to make quality discussions more visible. not sure though which scheme is best, what do you think? showing a single number which is the positives and negatives added together (digg style) showing two numbers, one for the number of positive comments, one for the number of negative comments having a up-to-5-star rating system, and displaying the average number of stars (like rhythmbox does for songs

aggregate statisics provide more insight on the topics and people involved in a list

threads are categorized and taggable

you can favorite threads to keep them in a favorites list (maybe across different mailing lists)

it’s hard to know a person’s signal-to-noise ratio on a mailing list. maybe the number of positive comments a user’s posts have received could contribute to a karma level which could elevate that person to some list of people affiliated with the list who are respected. (maybe have a troll bucket too? but i don’t like accentuating the negative)

would be nice to have a historical archive of the most interesting/popular/etc threads of all time. right now if it’s old enough it’s basically lost forever, because it’s too much effort to dig through the archives.

there’s a lot of interesting data/stas about mailing lists we don’t make use of… how many people are listening when i write a post to say Fedora’s devel list?