There has been mounting frustration over the last year as Plex has steamed ahead with new features and clients while leaving existing codebases... a bit rough. There's been a number of threads recently about the lack of feature parity with applications, the lack of communication from Plex employees themselves, and frustration with the lack of any official roadmap. Elan has been active in at least one of these threads and the general consensus thus far has been positive with some of the complaints being addressed. One of the areas that I still see pushback is a roadmap. There seems to be a relatively vocal group who are frustrated with the lack of communication between releases and absolutely 0 announcements about what might be in the release. While this may make sense for Plex due to competitive reasons/advantages it's leaving the community feeling left out and in some cases angry/defecting. While I realize this is not an overall representative sample of the Plex community there are still enough people commenting on and liking these posts that I feel something should be done.
Since it seems Plex is still standing firm in the their stance against a roadmap why don't we meet more in the middle? I'm proposing at least once a year, maybe more if time allows, for the community to decide 100% what goes into the next Plex release. I envision a system where the community can come together, create a list of potential features/bug fixes/polish, vote on said list, and the final group that gets through the voting process becomes the work for that release. The community can feel and BE more involved, this would organically create more communication between Plex and the community by the very nature of this workflow. Plex would benefit as I believe that this would take some of this anger and resentment and frustration that is building up and turn it towards a productive list of community driven features.
It's late and I'm probably not typing as clearly as I could be, so I'll edit this tomorrow. These are obviously my own opinions at this point, so if you agree please vote and comment with additional suggestions. I'll try to take any ideas we all agree upon and update/edit my initial proposal to reflect the opinions of the community.
However once a year is like an eternity is media land. So much changes in one year. I would honestly suggest 2 out of ever 3 releases are user driven.
Who better than the people using the software know what we want/need? I'm sure Plex Inc. has things they want to release but I guarantee you that 50-90% of those ideas will also be requested by users too so Plex gets a chance to throw in some things they wanted to anyway because users requested it. :)
I would have said 50/50 but based on past releases the last 6 months or so I think 1 of thee release will be needed just to fix/improve what was added as new. That leaves one release just for the users.
However once a year is like an eternity is media land. So much changes in one year. I would honestly suggest 2 out of ever 3 releases are user driven.
Carlo
I agree. I'll edit the parent post over my lunch break. Can a Mod edit the title for me? I'd like it changed to Do community driven releases on a semi-regular basis as that should cover any sort of final suggestion we come up with.
I tend to agree but I do not think it is even remotely possible to implement effectively. I highly doubt the user community could agree on features and the discussion, if it was even remotely perceived to be effective on directing Plex development, would quickly deteriorate to the online equivalent of shouting and name calling and "my idea is better than yours."
Even it it did retain a high standard and even if it were effective it would produce a product "designed by committee" and that is almost never a good thing. Remember it is said, "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" and where a camel is functional, efficient and practical it is also ugly, foul smelling and generally quite uncomfortable to be around. I don't want Plex to become more like a camel.
If too much user input was actually implemented then Plex would be overburdened with code that was really only useful or desired by a few. For an almost comical rendition of what could happen watch "Robocop II" and see what happened when Murphy was reprogrammed by a committee.
I think that the current way "suggestions" are handled is probably the best. The only thing I would really like to see changed is for Plex to be responsive to the suggestions posted stating the perceived value and if or if not the idea is even on the radar and what are the issues involved in implementation.
I do not want the user base to be able to mandate features but I would like to see better communication about possibilities in the future.
This is where a poll from the Plex Team would come in...
"Here's a list of things would have time to work on Which is YOUR priority?"
That was where I was going with it. The suggestion forums could stay largely "as-is" with the sole exception of a pole that would appear in some time frame before the team would actually start to develop. Then, when voting closed, a thread dedicated to said release could be opened and the developers could interact a bit with the community to figure out implementation minutiae. This obviously has the potential to get bogged down with needless bickering and would either have to be heavily moderated or tweaked, but I do believe the system could work given the proper thought and execution.
And I would suggest wiping the poll after each release. As we know, requirements can change with new releases. What once was not as important can become more important.
Plus this would get rid of votes from people no longer around or possibly even using Plex anymore.
I'm sure this would fly with the User's community, at least the vast majority of them... We would all get at least SOME input into the design process. We just need to get Plex to buy into a system like this.
Elan's pretty adamant that what there is works as is... I doubt this is going to fly without something MAJOR giving in on the Plex Team end first.
Roadmaps are good to have as far as planning but they can also lead to stifling innovation and slow down adoption of new technologies that come out every year.
Imagine for a second if there was a roadmap that did not include or take into account the release of a Roku and Chromecast.
Would the roadmap be immediately changed to incorporate those technologies?
If so then the roadmap would not be much use would it? It could change on a daily basis!
And if you did adhere to the roadmap that was laid out we would all still be waiting for Chromecast support because it wasn't in the plans yet.
Roadmaps are quite good when you are dealing with a large developer base such as is the case for Big Open Source projects.
But they do sometimes stifle progress because the fall back seems to be it isn't even looked at until it makes the roadmap.
But any semblance of what he goals for this year or near future would always be welcome...
I find the only reason for NOT doing that is to avoid those few spoiled brat users who complain when something announced doesn't make it to their device quick enough.
Very valid points of course. These are all just idea being thrown out.
Who knows, Elan recently said they are going to try and communicate better with the customers.
This might all be moot.
And in Plex's defense perhaps MORE isn't really the answer just a better way of doing it.
Perhaps an active Bug Tracker would better help to inform the users of issues and their progress as opposed to posting in a forum where 4 days from now the answer could be 4 pages away.
And feature requests could also be handled in a similar way.
Of course both of those require the manpower to maintain and merge duplicates which could be said to take away coding manpower needed to fix it.
Very valid points of course. These are all just idea being thrown out.
Who knows, Elan recently said they are going to try and communicate better with the customers.
This might all be moot.
I would hope that better communication equals some sort of interaction during development even if it's only about bugs and the new features are still kept under wraps. I'm hopeful what with elan being as active as he has been in your venting thread.
And in Plex's defense perhaps MORE isn't really the answer just a better way of doing it.
Perhaps an active Bug Tracker would better help to inform the users of issues and their progress as opposed to posting in a forum where 4 days from now the answer could be 4 pages away.
And feature requests could also be handled in a similar way.
Of course both of those require the manpower to maintain and merge duplicates which could be said to take away coding manpower needed to fix it.
I have faith things will get better in time.
I think an active bug tracker could potentially be a counter part or replacement to this idea. If properly implemented and staffed such that things actually got done and checked off I think the community would be thrilled.
I can go both ways on this...
Roadmaps are good to have as far as planning but they can also lead to stifling innovation and slow down adoption of new technologies that come out every year.
Imagine for a second if there was a roadmap that did not include or take into account the release of a Roku and Chromecast.
Would the roadmap be immediately changed to incorporate those technologies?
If so then the roadmap would not be much use would it? It could change on a daily basis!
And if you did adhere to the roadmap that was laid out we would all still be waiting for Chromecast support because it wasn't in the plans yet.
Roadmaps are quite good when you are dealing with a large developer base such as is the case for Big Open Source projects.
But they do sometimes stifle progress because the fall back seems to be it isn't even looked at until it makes the roadmap.
But any semblance of what he goals for this year or near future would always be welcome...
I find the only reason for NOT doing that is to avoid those few spoiled brat users who complain when something announced doesn't make it to their device quick enough.
Agreed, which is why I think a more dynamic system such as the one I am proposing could fill in the gap of feeling included in a "plan" while allowing Plex autonomy to operate as they are.
And I would suggest wiping the poll after each release. As we know, requirements can change with new releases. What once was not as important can become more important.
Plus this would get rid of votes from people no longer around or possibly even using Plex anymore.
Just an idea.
Definitely agree. The sub forum/thread/poll whatever for each release would need to be sanitized afterwards. The idea is to keep release completely separate. You don't want to necessarily use them to control the direction Plex is going but rather use it to patch up features the community really wants fixed and maybe do some small enhancements and tweaks (like your negative filtering). Or we all pile together and vote on one thing like re-architect Sync and ask very nicely that they do that. It would really boil down to the overall suggestion list and then the culling the devs do to determine what could work. A final vote, and development begins.
