[wp-hackers] Improving WordPress Core Development

[Mike Schinkel]

On Dec 29, 2009, at 3:18 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
> On Dec 29, 2009, at 3:12 PM, Matt Mullenweg wrote:
>> On 2009-12-29 11:52 AM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
>>> Anyway, that doesn't work nearly as well as UserVoice.
>> 
>> We can make the ideas forum better, and will. I prefer that over a dependency on an external, proprietary service.
> 
> Why must you reinvent the wheel when one already exists? Why work on something that you'll but 10% of your time into when someone else will be putting 100% of their time into? Why force us to wait on improvements until some unforeseen time in the future when those improvements could be had now?
> 
> The "Not Invented Here" syndrome has seen the downfall of many a powerful company. Why not learn from their experience?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here
> 

Let me add to this:

-- A lot more people are becoming familiar with how User Voice works than will ever be familiar with how WordPress' Ideas work. There is significant benefit to leveraging that which more people are familiar with[1]. 

-- If you ever find that your dependence on an external, proprietary service you can always revert to what you had before, and the benefits can rack up in the interim.

-- The (web) world is evolving to where people depend more and more on external proprietary services, i.e. [2]. Making decisions as if that were not happening is, respectfully speaking, not embracing the evolution of the web.

-Mike Schinkel
[1] http://socialcomputingjournal.com/viewlisting.cfm?id=84
[2] http://thesmallbusinessweb.com/

P.S. You have (at least) 3 constituency bases; users, themers and plugin developers.  What each of them want/need are different and ideally you'd have three different sets of idea forums (UserVoice or other) so that themers and plugin developers can recognize the top needs identified by other themers and plugin developers rather than have there issues be overwhelmed by user needs whose numbers are an order of magnitude larger but where themers and plugin developers efforts can be leveraged by an order of magnitude of users.  So the three list should all be looked at before determining priority.