Week 46: Rock the Linux Vote!

The US elections are (blessedly) over, and like any political junkie, I am suffering from withdraw symptoms. After months of polls, blogs, and cable news, I find myself craving the process of democratically electing something, anything.

So you can imagine how excited I was to see that some LDN users were starting taking advantage of our Brainstorming tool. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain what this section of the LDN is all about and encourage everyone to participate!

The Brainstorm section is derived from the various brainstorming pages found throughout the Linux and open source community. The most famous of these is likely Dell's IdeaStorm site, which started up in February of 2007 as a way for Dell's users to communicate their needs to the company in a public forum. The results of this experiment soon bore fruit: 10 weeks later, in May, Dell announced that they would be implementing the number one (with a bullet) idea on the IdeaStorm and launching a consumer line of pre-loaded Linux computers.

IdeaStorm marked the first time in recent memory a company was so direct in its response to consumer demand, and demonstrated that Dell wasn't just paying lip service to the notion.

This year, the Ubuntu Project launched a similar site, Ubuntu Brainstorm. Like IdeaStorm, the site allows interested users to post, vote on, and comment upon any idea they think will improve Ubuntu.

So, when LDN was being designed, it was clear to the design team that such a feature would be a great addition to the site.

When I describe this ideas to folks at various community events, the question I get asked the most is "what will actually happen with these?" After all, why submit an idea only to never see it acted upon? This is a fair question. My response is usually along the lines of this: being the Linux Foundation puts us in a unique position in the community to reach out and communicate with nearly anyone in the community that can affect change. From vendors to distribution companies to kernel developers, the Foundation can ask the right folks to look at a suggested idea and see what it would take to implement.

But it's going to take those ideas, folks, and the votes to get them up on top of the list. It's an easy process: submit your idea and then vote yea or nay on the ones you like (or not). One thing to note, too, is that submitted ideas and votes earn you points which will be redeemable for contests and giveaways from LDN (more on that later).

Affecting change in the Linux ecosystem was never easier.