What about a place where you can post your software wishes? Interested? Keep reading!

The other day I was thinking about dedicating some of my time to improve some piece of software (didn’t really matter what), just to give something back (yes, a weird concept).

The starting point

To kick-off the process of fulfilling my goal, I started looking around on the web for things that need improvement(yeah, I know it’s a crazy goal), as the web is filled with open source project that need help.

As I was browsing around I found the following kind of information:

• incident trackers. Common to all good software projects, with a huge tendency to fixate on bugs, rather than improvements. Few real end-users tend to use them, not so user-friendly, skip;
• sourceforge and freshmeat; no mentally sane grandma would even find it, let alone post a request;
• commercial product wish lists. Good for them, not so good for my goal;
• a lot of decentralized information scattered on forums and such, where users tend to request new features.

What I was really looking for was a nice, centralized wish list where end-users would write what they need from a specific piece of software, be it open source, freeware of commercial. Without even realizing at first, I had found my next “help somebody goal”.

The idea

What if I filled that gap? What about a site dedicated to the collection of end-user desires and to the collection of real end-user requirements for all kinds of software. As I started to think about it, the more sense it made. Project team members can come and interact with end-users, collect requirements and post them to their incident trackers. Projects could be configured to automatically notify team members of requests.

Let’s take it to the next level

• a centralized software wish list;
• end-users can post software wishes, without logging on, only leaving behind an email address where they can be notified when somebody fulfills their wish;
• end users can vote on wishes;
• members of project teams can come and see what users really want, post feedback; the voting system would give the developers some insight on how important a feature really is to the end-users;
• end-users can provide requirements;
• something nice and user-friendly but powerful enough to collect data for developers;
• all free.

One more level

How’s about some person that wants something incorporated in a software product really bad? I know you can buy services on sourceforge for it, but how many people know it?

How’s about helping them find out, taking them to the right place and helping them fund their wish, so that the developers get something out of it.

And we have a bonus! How’s about a special section that collects software ideas, helps collect requirements and that makes this info available to developers that want to help (you know, such as myself), because my guess is that there are a lot of developers out there that would love to create something new, they just don’t know what!

The result

So that’s my “help someone goal” for this year!
I am going to start cooking this thing, one step at a time. If you would like to help, answer this:

Would you use such a list if you knew that it would improve the software you use daily?

If you would like to hear more about this, you can subscribe to my blog and receive progress updates.