Hi Derek, and all.
Thanks for the posts so far.
About feature development, the main stuff is going on inside Moodle HQ in links from the Roadmap, but it's probably my fault for not bring that more into forums recently (just soooo busy). I like the idea for a forum dedicated to these current topics (assuming it just doesn't become a too-noisy place where everyone is promoting their favorite feature request du jour).
Apart from that, I'd like to see a fairly radical shift in restructuring moodle.org to cope with the increased numbers and the more international focus.
1. ALL the plugins discussion definitely needs to be shifted out and all plugins treated with equality. I think one new course called Plugins with auto-created forums for every new plugin in moodle.org/plugins. These would be automatically linked to from moodle.org/plugins, and used for GENERAL discussion and support about the plugin. Likewise, every new plugin should have a component in the tracker to handle bugs and feature requests for it (unless the author wants to use their own bug tracker somewhere else).
2. All the general core development discussions (which are international, and conducted in Moodle's official development language English) should also be put in a separate course. Originally I set them up here in Using Moodle intentionally to promote user/developer interaction, but our numbers have grown beyond this, and we have the tracker now, so I no longer think it's a big advantage. We can rationalise these forums down to a small number, and yes, a dedicated Feature Development forum would be great.
3. All the remaining forums in Using Moodle can become the core of a new "English Support" course. I would also collapse some of the other English courses like "Lounge", "Language teaching" and "Business Uses" into single forums and migrate them to this course as well. All the support forums (and special interests) in English discussing the use of Moodle would be in one course. This course can be a model for all the other support courses in other languages.
4. The "Useful" forum rating system that we have here in this course (from which the Recently rated posts feed is produced) has proven very useful as a democratic way of highlighting good forum content and popularising it across Twitter and everywhere. I propose we extend this across the site to all the different support forums in all languages, and use these feeds to populate the moodle.org front page. So if you arrive at moodle.org using a Japanese browser, not only will all the menus and top-level pages be in Japanese, but you will see a feed of recently rated posts taking up half the page there, with an invitation to see more, and get straight into the Japanese support course.
5. The tracker seems to be bagged here a bit but I think people are forgetting that the tracker is the most convenient thing for Moodle developers, enabling them to truly keep track of hundreds or thousands of tiny little requests, ideas and highly focussed discussions. And after all developers are the ones doing the work of creating and improving the software. It has revolutionised how we manage Moodle development among hundreds and thousands of people. Users should not mind doing just a little basic categorising and sorting of their ideas to make it easier for developers. That said, there's a lot we can do to improve the tracker interface for users and that is ongoing. But please let's focus on how to IMPROVE the tracker not AVOID the tracker. MDLSITE-1737
With those basics in place I think we'll have a much clearer community site that invites people world-wide to join in.
Who's with me??