Need Feature Voting revamped

Many, many, many good ideas come up in Feature Voting. With the wide array of cultures and peoples, SL has a huge pool of ideas to pull from. Some are good, some are not so good, and some are great. The Feature Voting system allows for us to put out our ideas and vote on them. Great concept.

Problem:
We only have 10 votes to distribute amoung hundreds of Proposals.
500 Votes are needed to get LL's comments on a Proposal.
The percentage of persons whom read the forums, and use the Feature Voting, is very small in relation to the number of active residents. Even less compared to the number of registered residents.

This sytem may have worked in the past, but, imo, SL has grown beyond the system Feature Voting currently uses.

Proposals of great merit have gone unacknowledged, while others show a misrepresentation of the active residents point of view.

Ideas:
1) Residents allowed 1 vote per Proposal. Either Yea, or Nay. This would allow a Resident to vote on every Proposal showing if they were for or against such an idea, and would enable for a more accurate view of what the majority of residents want. This would ahve to be combined with the Hardware Hash system so that only one vote per system could be cast to prevent Alt-Voting. Alternative would be to restrict Voting to only Premium accounts, but this would be unfair imo, and only to be concidered as a last resort.
2) Proposals reciveing a certain planed percentage over a set period of time (I would reccomend a 70%-30% spilt over a one week period) to the Yea votes would be acknowledged by Linden Lab and be placed in an In-world Que to let all residents know about the Proposal. This could be done by World Anouncments (Every 4 hours would be my recommendation. This would allow for most timezones and not spam persons as much.) and to set the Message of the Day to have the message that a proposal is up for World Review to allow all logging in to know. MotD would simply be as such; Example: "Prop xxxx Up for Resident Review. See Forum for Details." Short enough to allow other messages to still proceed it but giving all information of what and where.
3) In return, any Proposal yielding a Nay percentage would be removed from the main voting area and set to an Archived Rejected Proposal area. This would clear up the main voting area while still allowing for the possibility of the vote being turned on said Proposal.
4) To have a Linden Lab Employee assigned to browse through the Proposals and to have any ideas of merit, or poor ideas, brought to the aprropriate Linden Lab Employee's attention reguardless of how many votes it has currently recieved. By doing this, good ideas can be commented on and acted upon as needed/desired by Linden Lab. Poor ideas can be commented on to as why they are poor ideas instead of just letting Proposals sit and rot. Being ignored is far worse than being politely told why an idea is wrong or unable to be done.

I realise some of the ideas overlap things already done on the Feature Proposals. It is a good system. I only think SL has grown beyond it. As a community, we learn and grow by sharing ideas and concepts. We can only share those things by communitcation. As a community, I feel the Residents want to use the Feature Voting to communicate ideas and concpets to Linden Lab as was the intent, but the stagnation of votes on good Proposals due to lack of available Votes and of Proposals not being recognised due to not recieving the needed Votes due to this is disenheartening. This is not a reflection of Linden LAb's attitude. The effort of late to communicate with Residents ahs shown (to me at least) that Linden LAb does care, and does want to make a better world for us all. I simply feel it is time to expand and improve teh tools with which this is done.

~Jessy

Allo Jessy!

We also agree that some of these would be precious--we've raised them ourselves and it's a matter of getting it done. I'd certainly like to see the Feature Voting Tool improved, and usage increased.

One reason why you can allocate more than a single vote to a proposal at present is to indicate where your personal priorities and commitments are. For example, giving all 10 to something instead of spreading 2 votes amongst 5 proposals may be a good indicator you *really* care about an issue. It's about prioritization and focus.

#2 is interesting because it connects to what we want to do in the way of better inworld announcements and an improved MotD tool.

"Nay" voting wasn't done because of concerns it'd be used to grief the system; using your scenario, a group of people could target proposals they don't like and strike them down en masse by voting no. I do understand, however, the absence of an opinion isn't the same as saying "HELL NO!"

Some of the simplest things may be best: I know there are Resis who wish to have their votes autoreturned when something's done, and better yet, autonotification when a feature gets implemented! That would save looking at release notes for some.

In some way, I also wonder if we'll need feature voting proposals to change the system itself.

Thanx for sharing your ideas; always good to consider the possibilities.

BTW--please feel free to let me know (torley@lindenlab.com) specifically which ones!