Update: Jam voting has been extended to June 13th! Vote now at jazz.ideajam.net.

Are you chock full of ideas and looking for a means to express them? Do you have a wish list or some pet peeves about our products? Are you looking for a way to let your voice be heard?

Well then, I’m happy to announce our first ever Jazz Plan Jam, which begins on May 30. Together with our developerWorks colleagues, we’re trying something new as part of the planning for our next revision of our Jazz products.

Normally we triage new requests, participate in conversations in work items, read the forums, interact with many of you in one-on-one conversations and through our client programs. Then, at the start of our planning cycle, we agree on the most important items that will make their way into our products.

This year we’re supplementing the normal stuff by inviting you to an open, on-line Jam session.  During the Jam, you can propose new ideas for improving our products and give a thumbs up or thumbs down to the ideas of others. Our hope is to learn not only what is most important to you, but also to spark your creative juices. We can’t promise to implement all of the ideas, but the Jam results will influence how we prioritize what we do next.

How’s the Jam work?
The Jam is organized around a set of themes, including:

• ease-of-use
• Agile development
• large scale and Enterprise deployment
• feature gaps
• lifecycle integration
• DevOps and continuous delivery
• embedded software development and product line engineering
• lifecycle scenarios

These themes are presented as a set of questions under a drop down list:

Within each theme are ideas. When you choose a theme, you’ll see a list of ideas that you can vote on (like or dislike) and comment about. If your idea isn’t in the Jam you can add it and let the rest of the community respond to it. The amount of time you spend is up to you. Vote on one idea, vote on many! Throughout the Jam you can track which ideas are hot and who the top contributors are (it could be you!). It’s a social site, designed to capture our collective intelligence on what we’ll do next.

For those of you attending our annual Innovate conference in Orlando, we’ll have some sessions where we post the current Jam hot topics, and you can pick up Plan Jam swag by stopping by the Solution Center.

Transparency is in our blood
I’ll admit that the Jam is a bit of an experiment for us, but it’s true to our spirit of transparency and, as they say — nothing ventured, nothing gained! At the end of the Jam I’ll be back to blog about what we learned.

The Jam runs from May 30th through June 6th June 13th. You must register at the Jam site to post or vote.  Pre-registration is open now. Check it out at jazz.ideajam.net.

Carolyn Pampino
Design Factory team lead and ALM evangelist
cpampino@us.ibm.com

P.S. I’d be remiss if I did not offer a warm thanks to Bruce Elgort and our friends at Elguji Software, who are hosting the Jam site with their IdeaJam software. Thanks Bruce!