<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
<link href="chrome://translator/skin/floatingPanel.css"
type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 02/12/2013 10:25, Mark Banner wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:529C6014.6030702@mozilla.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 30/11/2013 05:38, Ben Bucksch wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">2. The idea of steering the feature development by the funds. We've
discussed this at length, but summary is: A donation gives you a vote
for features, but with the clear statement that this is just
expressing a wish and direction and the funds will go into a general
pool. We would still cover needed expenses first and make that clear.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">I think you'd need to be very clear how that wish would be used, but
really I think you should totally decouple the two.
Voting for features, as we know from Bugzilla, really doesn't work very
well. I don't think donations should necessarily have preferential
treatment or expectations. You're basically asking a the group of
"people willing to donate" rather than "people who want something and
have signed up to bugzilla to try and get it".</pre>
</blockquote>
I think in Bugzilla voting doesn't work so well because it is a very
wide net spanning lots of bugs - there is simply not the manpower to
look at everything. I would imagine if we had proper funds / user
management it should be possible to carry out polls based on a
number of preselected bugs (say 10 at a time) and asking the users
to prioritize them, via a poll. This could be a good way to gauge
and honor what is important to the users. The point is that a
management structure needs to preselect some suitable candidates
first, and that is the tricky part.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:529C6014.6030702@mozilla.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I think if you really want some extra feedback, then you could have a
survey available after people have donated, but I wouldn't couple that
to the donation itself.</pre>
</blockquote>
I think so too - but the problem with surveys is that they are
usually not coupled to a commitment to a certain action. If I had a
survey saying we will commit to fix one (or three) of the following,
please choose the one most important to you, this would send a
stronger message on how Thunderbird is different from closed source
competitors.<br>
<br>
I would also like more focus on <b>marketing </b>to gain more
users, especially in features where Thunderbird is superior to the
usual suspects. For instance it still appears to be a lot easier and
reliable to find "filed away" emails using Thunderbird as opposed to
Outlook. Same with the "Tabbed Mail" feature, I use this constantly
to pin emails for later reading without affecting their actual
status (e.g. flag etc). <br>
<br>
IMO there should be some funds to advertise and market things like
these and this would be a worthwhile use for some of the possible
(donation?) funds.<br>
<br>
<br>
<div style="bottom: auto; left: 1096px; right: auto; top: 591px;
display: none;" class="translator-theme-default"
id="translator-floating-panel">
<div title="Click to translate"
id="translator-floating-panel-button"></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>