As part of my role as the community manager for the Suggestions category, I find it important to be attentive to the feedback from the community looking to contribute ideas to the category. In my conversations with contributors and team members, I discovered that many users refrain from contributing to the category due to lack of clarity and understanding of what makes a quality suggestion.

While the guidelines and post template provide a basic outline for what is expected in the category, it seems to me that there is room for additional information, examples, and details on what makes a stellar contribution worthy of reward.

It is my hope that this guide will help contributors, both new and old, reach and exceed the level of excellence expected from all Utopian.io contributors.

When to suggest

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Not all ideas and suggestions are worthy of development or reward. Often, the difference between a useful idea and random idea is at its very inception. There are specific things to consider before suggesting any feature to a project.

Know The “Enemy”

Before making a suggestion, it’s important to know the project and fully comprehend its purposes, goals, competitors, user audience and roadmap.

Be sure to use the app or project plenty, and that you know its ins and outs before suggesting a new feature. In addition to using the app, you can also learn a lot from some creative research of the market, and even read the project blog to catch up on the latest development plans.

Scan for Duplicates

Submitting an idea someone previously had is not only awkward but can be a waste of time better invested in some other suggestion. So before suggesting an idea, be sure to scan for duplicate on utopian, the GitHub issue tracker and/or the project discussion forum.

Be One of a Kind

Even non-duplicate submissions can be effectively unoriginal. Obviously, suggesting the same feature across multiple similar app is not very beneficial to the projects or ecosystem. Neither are suggestions of features that exist in similar apps and the project owner is most probably aware of.

The ideal Suggestions contribution is one that makes the project owner respond with “Wow! That’s genius! I must add this to the app, just like the suggestion says!” and includes a sufficiently detailed description of the feature proposed.

Group It Up

If you are an avid user of a project or app, it’s not unlikely that you have more than one idea to suggest to improve it. Often, it might be a list of small improvements to the projects that on their own would not make for a quality submission to Utopian.io. The best way to make such “batch” suggestions for the overall improval of a project is to include 2-3 such ideas in a single submission.

Getting to Work: Submitting a Contribution

Guidelines

The post guideline has been simplified with some examples given to help users understand the concept of creating a valuable contribution.

Suggestions detail potentially beneficial significant technical features / enhancements to an Open Source project.
Suggestions are technical feature/enhancements that are of significant potential added-value to an Open Source project.
Suggestions relating to product or organizational processes will not be considered for reward.
Images, charts, screenshots, links, references and examples should be included when applicable.
To be considered for reward, suggestions should be original, unique and uncommon among similar or competing apps.

The title of the submission post should include the project name, and a short but informative description of the suggestion described in the post.
Submissions should include extensive details and (when possible) instructions for the suggested feature to be actualized.
Examples
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jga/steem-proposal-to-reduce-voting-rings-and-self-voting
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@smcaterpillar/steem-improvement-proposal-revoting-power-to-counter-upvote-circles-and-bid-bot-abuse
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@ckole/enhancement-of-libot-adventure
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@tykee/ability-to-synchronize-activities-dairy-with-gps

Template

The post template serves as a guideline to help you format your contribution to comply with certain structure standards for Utopian.io, but also gives you quite a few hints, that go beyond the guidelines, on what is expected to be included in your post.

Components: Specify the components/features/interfaces/applications of the software your suggestion relates to.

In this section, you need to describe the project you are submitting the suggestion to in terms of features, uses, applications and potential user-base. This should not be a challenge since, as stated below, the project you are suggesting to should be one you fully comprehend.

Once you’ve described the overall intent and purpose of the project, detail the main aspect/feature of the project you would like to see enhanced. Share your experience in using the project, expanding on how your proposal can improve your experience and that of others.

Detail your proposal in length and explain how you think the above-mentioned components/parts/sections should be modified/enhanced.

We want to make the developers lives easier in understanding and integrating the awesome idea suggested. So once you have the solution conceived in your mind, you need to describe it in as much detail as possible, giving the project owner everything you can provide to help them actualize your suggestion through verbal description, code snippets (when applicable), and making the description as realistic and informative as you can possibly be.

If applicable, insert visual mockups, examples, and flow-charts to show the possible result of the implementation of your suggestion.

To complement the text above, add your sketches, flow-charts, and visuals in this section of the post. Using mockups and visual representation of the desired enhancement can help readers (including the project owner) clearly understand how your suggestion can to be implemented.

Mockups could be used in every proposed suggestion/enhancement. For example, you could represent how a particular code should function by rendering it in flow-chart.

Illustrate and explain in depth the added value and benefits that your proposal holds, and the problems it will solve if implemented.

Convincing a developer to integrate YOUR suggestion and not some other feature is hard work. In this section, pretend you are a salesperson trying to sell the idea of your feature to the developer. Describe the benefits your idea has to the project, all the significant advantages that your suggestion will add to the project or the aspect of the project you want to enhance. Spare no words and show examples and use-cases for your suggestion.

Moderator feedback

Our team of moderators is not only tasked with objectively evaluating your contributions, but also with helping you learn from their professional experience in the field of conceptual product development. Don’t hesitate to reply to the comment and ask for additional insights into how your work can be even more useful and impactful on the Open Source projects you love.

Conclusion

Having followed the steps above, you are now ready to contribute to the Suggestions category on Utopian.io! It is my hope this tutorial has given you all the tools and knowledge to publish inspiring, innovative and awesome ideas.

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