our plan is to dedicate time, across all our public-facing developer teams, to work exclusively on requests that have come in from the community
This is awesome and I can't find words to express how pleased I am :)
I really look forward to what this will produce, and I wholeheartedly agree on the internal benefits of getting staff exposed to the public sites.
My personal thanks to each staff member who participated in this first sprint.
I'm also glad that this is regularly scheduled (quarterly is great imo! honestly- more than I hoped for) and defined as a sprint (that is- it has a defined duration- whatever duration your sprints are). It gives me confidence that there's a plan and commitment to keep this going. And I'd really love this to keep on going long-term.
On prioritization
an older post would only climb the queue if it kept getting community attention despite its age
What kind of activity contributes to this? Like Tyler, I'm a little skeptical of whether this will produce a prioritization reflecting what we care about and how much we care about it.
This platform and its culture are pretty anti-noise. For example, we can be pretty disciplined about not piling on "I'm having this too" comments years after a bug was reported. I can only upvote once, and even if a post gets bumped enabling me to un-upvote and re-upvote to signal that I still care, that's not how I want this system to work. In other words, the system doesn't have a proper mechanism for me to say that I still care about something. And I personally think it's fair and workable to assume that if I cared about something X duration ago, I still care about it now.
Also, on the subject of prioritization, I wonder if (and that is my polite way of communicating personal values) a better way to start this off is to first focus on lower-hanging fruit that affects a lot of our quality of life. Stuff that's easy and non-controversial to implement, and maybe seems insignificant at a glance, but where the small improvement affecting a large group of users, or a relatively smaller, but highly actively helpful set of users results in a large net benefit. There are quite a few small rough edges that I face every day in my use of this platform and I can't help but feel like many of them shouldn't be too difficult to address, and that if they were addressed, my user experience would be much more pleasant.
If you're looking for ideas on mechanisms to see what users currently want prioritized, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good model (but just that it came to mind as something that stood out from systems where you just upvote once for all time), webpack has a thing. I don't know exactly how it works but it looks like there's some sort of mechanism for using more or less of your voting power on individual requests. Not sure if votes are movable at any time.