Symbian pathways

At the time of writing, ideas.symbian.org contains 203 ideas.  The site has been awaiting a facelift for several months, and its present appearance can be a bit intimidating.  But don’t let that put you off – it contains plenty of interesting ideas, ranging through curious and clever to challenging and courageous.

If you like one of these ideas, please vote for it.  (You can vote for as many different ideas as you like.)  If you dislike it, you can vote against it – and please leave a comment, telling us why.  You can jump into a discussion on any of the ideas, or raise an idea of your own, for community review.

(You can read the ideas and the associated discussion without logging into the site.  If you want to participate more actively, you’ll need a login.  Email me at davidw AT symbian DOT org, and I’ll ensure an invite comes your way.  For more details of the intended operation of the site, see my previous article, “Looking for producers“).

Here are extracts from a few ideas you might enjoy browsing:

Multimedia Playability Database – posted by Martin Webb:

I’m sure many of you will have experienced the problems of playing multimedia on phones – much of your content won’t play, even though the phone apparently supports the format you are trying to use.

There are many reasons for this – e.g. bit rates for even SD content are too high for phones.  However, another key issue is that testing multimedia content is hard – you can test multimedia , demuxers etc individually to death, and still have problems, due to the way things work at a system level (e.g. a bad encoding – not the phone’s fault, but still disappointing for the user and not an excuse with service providers).

The solution is to test with as much content as possible, but this takes time.  Fortunately, this problem seems ideal for a collaborative community, and so I propose a playability database…

Choose appropriate licensing to better account for closed-source additions – posted by Ajay:

I congratulate the Symbian Foundation for choosing a weak copyleft license with the EPL, that doesn’t enforce open source on all authors of future modules that might be added to the Symbian platform.  However, there are two problems with this choice that I’d like to see addressed: the EPL is not very well-written in this regard and there are possible licensing conceptions that might better enable closed-source additions.  I will address each in turn…

Idea for a Sharing Application for S60 & Symbian Browsers – “Echo” – posted by Micky Aldridge:

Similar to the already familiar full sized web-based sharing extensions, such as ShareThis, Feedly, and ShareAholic, its high time that we had a mobile version for our S60, and Symbian Internet browsers, something very discrete, and simple to use to share any site’s url, with a comment, posting to one of several options, be it Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook, or email.

Basically, the already built-in Share URL, which is available by selecting the three horizontal lines in the right hand side menu whilst browsing, has potential, but it simply does not do enough.  For example, the options are “Via message”, Via Bluetooth”, and Via Share on Ovi”.  None of these do what people want…

Promotion of a Symbian applications prototyping solution – posted by Constantine Michailidis:

Making a worthy, useful mobile application with a potential to become a [commercial] success can be very difficult. As you may already know by the desktop environment, much is decided before you even start typing your code: while designing the application, its UI, its features as requested by the client, or simply by implementing the idea you had in mind. All these things have to come out perfect if maximum usability is what you are after.

I wanted to ask here: does Symbian Foundation have any official or semi-official program to help with the “design phase” of application development? Yes, I mean the initial one, while you design (maybe with pen-and-paper) the various screens and controls the application will show…

Healthcare application – posted by Suyog Vaidya:

I am starting this thread to discuss a potential application.

The application proposed is a mechanism to detect undue periods of inactivity of users (elderly or infirm) which might indicate an emergency. The app is provisioned with user specific information including the period of inactivity which might indicate an emergency.

On crossing of various thresholds, the app will throw up interaction dialogs which when attended to shall, in effect, reset the monitoring intervals. Simple movement of the device shall also reset the interval…

Adding More and Versatile Calendar Views – posted by Antoine RJ Wright:

Something that I wish were in the built-in calendar was this idea of additional views. Right now, we have day, week, and month views, but that should not be all the information, or presentation of information that we see.

One view that would come in handy is a call log view. In this view I would see a daily, weekly, montly log of calls, except it would be overlaid to my calendar so that I could do additional things with that information – make notes, send proof to others, etc.

Another view that would be suitable is the ability within the calendar to see all messages as they came in or were sent out. Again, this messages view would be overlaid to those traditional views, but it would give an alternate look to the data that we already want to manage and see…

Audible “call progress” information – posted by William Roberts:

I would like to have an audible indication of why a call has failed, preferrably a spoken one, so that I don’t miss the dialogue box which is displayed while I have the phone pressed to my ear, wondering what’s happening.

Whether you like these ideas or hate them – or whether you think you have better ideas that are worth sharing – your input will be welcome!

Everywhere I turn, I run into ideas about the future of mobile:

• ideas about new or improved mobile applications, services, tools, devices, experiences, alliances…

People frequently seek my support for their suggestions on all aspects of the future of mobile technology, the future of the mobile industry, and the future of Symbian.  “Why doesn’t Symbian invest some time and money to improve such-and-such…” they ask.  “Surely you agree it’s a good idea?”

There are big limitations in my own personal ability to discern the most significant and deserving of this rich brew of ideas.  Happily, help is at hand, via the evaluative skills of the Symbian community as a whole. Indeed, it’s a core part of my job, not only to encourage and support the Symbian community to propose ideas, but to encourage and support the Symbian community to collectively review and prioritise ideas.

We are using the site ideas.symbian.org for this purpose.  This site is being developed as a place where people can:

• Propose and assess ideas about Symbian (technology, services, strategy, initiatives…);
• Weigh up the community’s best thinking about Symbian;
• Guide Symbian management in decision making;
• Establish reputations as leading thinkers about Symbian;
• Participate in Symbian’s philosophy of Open Management.

As you can see for yourselves, the site still has some rough edges.  But it already contains (to my mind) an intriguing set of ideas.  If we get the design right, I expect that the site will attract regular visits and contributions from participants who cover the entire mobile value chain – including end users, analysts, researchers, designers, developers, and employees from companies both inside and outside the Symbian Foundation.

Ideas progress through stages

A key aspect of the design of ideas.symbian.org is that ideas pass through stages.

Usually, an idea starts in Stage 1 – “Seeking support” (also called “Being defined”). Other people viewing the site are able to comment on that idea, and cast votes either in favour or against it. They can also comment on previous comments made against the idea.  In this way, good ideas spark useful discussion.  To make cases for or against ideas, people can provide links to research data and other market findings.

To progress to the next stage, the idea must

1. Have received a certain number of “page views”
2. Have generated a certain amount of discussion
3. Have sufficient approval votes and not too many negative votes
4. Be approved by at least one designated Expert in the category applicable to that idea
5. Be complete and clear enough (administrator’s & expert’s judgement).

In some occasions, the relevant category expert may instead decide that the idea, as proposed, is insufficiently actionable.  The “idea” may simply be saying, “something needs to be done about problem A or opportunity B”.  That can still be a good topic for discussion, but it’s not ready to receive votes and progress higher up the ladder of stages.  In that case, the idea can be demoted to stage 0.  It can come back to stage 1 once a specific concrete idea has emerged.

(Aside: In the current implementation of the ideas site, there isn’t a formal “Stage 0″.  Instead, there’s a separate notion of “discussion threads” for topics that aren’t yet ready to be progressed.  People can still cast votes in these threads, but in this case the votes indicate whether they find the topic interesting or uninteresting.)

Stage 2: Finding a producer

Deciding that an idea has sufficient merit is the business of Stage 1 discussions.  Stage 2 discussions are different.

By this time, the idea is clear and well understood, but nobody has stepped forward to make it happen.  Discussion now revolves less around the idea itself and more around how to find someone to take it forward and get it implemented (the “Producer”).

This may also mean that the idea is changed to make it more attractive to a Producer.  In some cases this may change the idea beyond the originator’s intention – this should be discussed between the originator and the producer, but ultimately the decision lies with the producer (who is, after all, the person or organisation who will be putting the work into implementing it).

In some cases, the producer will be an employee of the Symbian Foundation, and the idea will be implemented as a project (large or small) inside the Symbian Foundation.  However, in other cases, a producer will emerge from the community at large.  He or she will say: “this is a good idea – I will make it happen”.  And the resources used during implementation may come from far and wide:

• Established companies;
• New companies;
• Open source projects involving developers with some free time available;
• University research projects.

Finding gems

The ideas site supports many ways of viewing the different ideas it contains.  The “view all ideas” page allows viewers to list ideas by modification date, post (origination) date, popularity, author, and so on.  Further, it allows filtering of ideas – by category, by stage, etc.

For example, this filter lists all ideas that are currently in “Finding a producer” stage.  I urge you to take a look!  At the time of writing, there are 30 such ideas to consider.

Of course, it’s not just in the “well trodden path” of Stage 2 ideas where you can find starting points to set your own thoughts racing.  There are (at time of writing) some 145 ideas in Stage 1.  Some of these are, in my view, unduly neglected.  It’s well worth dipping into these lesser visited parts of the site.  There are some gems of ideas waiting to be unearthed and developed.

Footnote: Implementing the ideas site

Symbian’s ideas site is provided by Spigit – a general purpose social networking tool for idea and innovation management.  You can read more about Spigit from their website, which is well worth browsing.  Spigit’s offerings contain many features, suited to different contexts.  Symbian is still in the process of choosing and customising which of these features we want to be prominent on our ideas site.  We even have a category of ideas reserved for suggesting improvements in the implementation of the site itself: “Operation of this website“.

For the time being, the Symbian ideas site is open to general viewing, without need of user registration.  However, if you want to vote, comment, or raise an idea of your own, you’ll need a formal login.  Anyone who is already part of the site can invite you to join (they do this via the “Invite” button in their “My profile” page on the site).  If you’d like me to drop you an invite, let me know your email address (for example, you can DM me on twitter).  I look forward to seeing your own ideas, and your comments on other people’s ideas.  Most of all, I look forward to seeing a blossoming and productive matchmaking between ideas originators and ideas producers.