A short-term roadmap for Bitwish

About Bitwish
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UPDATED ON 2022-01-31

Bitwish was born as a Bitwig community wishlist on Nov 5. It has been evolving since them. What’s next?

What follows is a short-term roadmap including the Wishlist but not limited to it. This project already has brought many bitwiggers, and they have brought many ideas. We stand on the shoulders of a very powerful open source platform (Discourse) that can take many functions missing in the Bitwig community.

Future

Ideas to be considered and agreed upon before any work starts.

Sorting out tags

Bitwish is not the only site on the internet where tags have grown… organically. While most of the existing tags have a reason to be, currently there are different tag families that are mixed.

What about a plain discussion forum?

If there is interest and critical mass, we can do this too. Just ask. Technically speaking, we already have everything we need. Discourse is simply the best forum software, designed for creating safe and friendly spaces of conversation.

Integration with Bitwig’s Discord

It’s not just that Discourse and Discord sound confusingly similar, they also integrate very well. In most communities there are use cases for real-time private (or cozy) chat as well as asynchronous, structured, and public collaboration. If there is interest, we could explore further steps connecting Bitwish and Bitwig’s Discord. Currently there is a small and manually maintained connection.

What about [your idea here]?

Nothing in this roadmap was in anyone’s mind when Bitwish was created. These ideas have been coming thanks to this inspiring platform. If you have more ideas, let’s talk! If they are good for Bitwig, they should be good for us.

Ongoing

Some work is underway and more ideas are welcome.

Languages

Recently we added the possibility to Request a new language on Bitwish. The first languages testing this setup are German / deutsch and Spanish / español. More languages are welcome! If there is demand, we can make this languiage support (now pretty basic) more sophisticated – join the discussion on Support for languages other than English on Bitwish.

Music

The Music category continues under development. Some ideas about next steps…

Recently we implemented user profile fields for artist links on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, and YouTube. Users adding links there will have small icons in their user card and user profile linking to their artist page in these platforms.

If there is interest, we could offer more features related to these publishing platforms:

  • Badges for creators on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, etc, that not only look good in user profiles but also allow to see a list of all Bitwish users on a certain platform.
  • Topics for creators on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, etc, to meet and discuss how to best use these platoforms.
  • Even groups for more cozy conversation.

The discussion continues on Planning a space to share music on Bitwish - #33 by icaria36.

Stable

In these areas the work consists in increasing adoption and fine-tuning. No new features currently planned, although we always welcome ideas.

Community Wishlist

The basic functionality is in place with the Drafts and the Features.

Here the progress is less technological and more social: we need more users casting more votes and bringing more proposals, and we need to clarify the relationship with the Bitwig team. Both processes take time and perseverance, and we have both. :slight_smile:

Bitwiggers . com

The integration with Bitwiggers.com, the place to share Bitwig Presets and Clips, is also in place (check). On 2021-12-11 we announced A new space to celebrate and discuss Bitwig presets and clips.

We continue adding improvements as new ideas are discussed here.

Tutorials

Aka the Bitwig Video Guide. A (casually) structured selection of video tutorials produced by many creators in the Bitwig community. The structure of the Guide was completed on 2021-12-17.

The work now consists on actually adding videos and curating them. Ideas are welcome here.

Music

Music is the whole point of all this Bitwig thing, right? :sunglasses: Many people release tracks and albums produced with Bitwig. Some of these works are free, some can be paid, and all of them look for listeners. Some of these artists are hobbyists, some are professional (or trying to make the jump), and all of them look for feedback and peers.

On 2021-12-12 the Music category was created with the first music-monthly topic. A few days later the category was open for new topics about tracks or albums. We also enabled OGG, MP3 and bwproject uploads.

Community

Feature requests, presets, tutorials, music… all bring together creative and collaborative bitwiggers. When interesting people share a space, interesting things happen. How can we promote and spice up this collaboration?

  • Private groups are available for anyone developing any Bitwig-related activity and welcoming the safety and focus of an own working space.
  • Special badges can be used to find and recognize music artists, preset creators, producers of tutorials, contributors to feature requests, certified trainers, and other excellent community members. For details and proposals, see Bitwish badges.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Planning a space to share music on Bitwish

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I think there are a lot of great feature requests on here now. I’m wondering how to get some communication with Bitwig developers to hopefully lead to some of these feature requests being implemented, or if there is already any dialogue going with anyone from Bitwig. I think maybe it would be good if there was something like a main summary page of most requested features, that could be posted on some of Bitwig’s social media pages, in the hopes of getting some dialog going with them about the most requested features.

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REAPER used to have a similar system where people could vote on feature requests, but it was shut down eventually (before I started using it, so I don’t have first hand experience).

I think the problem is that it creates the expectation that the highest voted request will be implemented first. This can put a lot of pressure on the developers and creates a lot of frustration for users if it doesn’t happen because the request doesn’t fit the vision of the developer.

Like Henry Ford allegedly said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

So while this resource is probably really valuable to the developers, it might be difficult to get them to acknowledge it publicly.

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I’ll just say that we’re trying, but these things may take time. Since Bitwish was published without prior notice a few weeks ago, they have got bugfix releases, a still ongoing Winter sale, the IMSTA FESTA, a partnership with Ujam… and the holidays are just around the corner, and this is only what one can see from the outside. I’m hopeful, but also aware that this wil require some patience.

Yes, community wishlists can be problematic in many ways, and I know well because I work in a rather big organization that organizes an annual community wishlist survey.

I think the problems you point out are real (i.e. people thinking they have the right to get a feature implemented because a hundred people voted on it). However, here too I’m hopeful. If we can define a good collaboration with the Bitwig team (so they tell us what they need from us to be helpful with their work), then that’s half of the way. Then we need to be serious here with… education (explaining how product development works and doesn’t work) and moderation (keeping a creative, collaborative, constructive, and friendly space with high quality discussions).

Something like that. But also here patience is necessary as a community, hence the idea of bringing other missing community features so that we have other fun and interesting things to do here other than waiting for the next Bitwig release.

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That makes sense. I’m hopeful that since Bitwig is a smaller company, and that since they seem to be developing it faster than other DAW’s, we might see some dialogue from them about some of these feature requests. I appreciate that Bitwig comes out with features that none of us expected or necessarily wanted (like operators in v4, or the recent note effects in 4.1), but that are innovative, and might change the way we approach music production. But it would be really nice to see them take some community feedback as well. I would especially like to see more development with The Grid, because it is one my favorite features of Bitwig.

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I think you’re right. The key is probably good moderation to keep this a constructive and supportive space. The way some people ask for features in the REAPER forums is very obnoxious and manipulative and I have no idea how the developers but up with this.

If we manage to make the developers feel welcome here, regardless of how many of the requested features they implement, they’ll probably be open to listening to the community.

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It took only 20 days to tap in all the areas mentioned on this short-term roadmap. :tada:

The Community Wishlist process is working. Next is to clarify whether and how the Bitwig team wants to use it.

The collaboration with Bitwiggers has also entered a stable phase, after connecting +2600 presets and clips with Bitwish topics. Next is to see whether presets creators and users find this space useful.

The Bitwig Video Guide (maybe we should simply call this section “Tutorials”) is also stabilized, after all the expected topics have been created. Next is to proof whether tutorials creators and users find this space useful.

The Music section has started with a monthly topic and it seems to be catching up. Next is to see whether this becomes a space whether music creators can receive feedback and make connections.

The Bitwish badges are a reality now, and dozens of Bitwishers have got theirs already. Suggestions for new badges are welcome.

About the private groups, this is Discourse functionality that comes out of the box. Currently they are not being promoted because we seem to need a critical mass of individuals first. In any case, if you want to try a private group for any Bitwig cause, just request it.

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Many notes in here about the sometimes hard to see distance between a popular idea and a good idea.

I think one feature of this forum that could help quell expectations is some pre-emptive triage where we rate complexity vs. expected usage and effect. I know that this will – as most things in life do – put the misfits and fringe creators at the back of the line. But aside from reworking Bitwigs entire business model, this bummer seems inevitable.

To reiterate: is it possible to make “effort vs impact” a surface level discussion for any request?

If we push primarily on high-impact low-effort features, perhaps something will come of it.

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@Seph_Reed Thank you for this feedback, and I see your point.

The wishlist as it is now was a best guess, a semi-informed short in the dark. :slight_smile: The Bitwig team wasn’t consulted. I believe the current setup has been ok to kick things off and get a decen collection of ideas and also a sense of interest at least among the “advanced” audience that has signed up here.

Before doing any changes to the current setup, we would need to better understand how this wishlist can be most useful to the Bitwig team. What they would like to find here. Based on this, the platform is quite flexible so I guess we will be able to accommodate.

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Roadmap updated in anticipation of the upcoming January report. This is just an update and reorganization of this roadmap. The only item not mentioned somewhere before is the organization of tags in the “Future” section.

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Integration with Bitwig’s Discord added to the “Future” section.