Allocate multiple points to ideas. I'll first explain my line of thought before I outline my idea.
Right now we have the buttons up and down to increase or decrease the total points by 1. It doesn't get much simpler than this, it is great:
* I like it -> 1up
* I don't like it -> 1down
But what if I think an idea is remarkably good or incredibly bad?
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/94/ "Fix Suspend and Hibernate" is a real important idea for me but it still only gets 1up when I click the button.
There is no possibility to distinguish between good but less important ideas (
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/8972/ "Don't show the fast user swith applet if there is just one user") and really good an extremly important ideas like mentioned suspend fix.
Finally, my idea:
For this to work, made votings need to be changable (
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/83/ "Allow changing of votes in brainstorm") and an limited amount of points. I thougt a good amount of points would be the quantity of ideas but when is an idea an idea? The moment it is posted? After no duplicates could be found? After an initial phase of voting ups?
Lets assume we now have this amount of points based on something and want to assign them.
The design of the voting buttons would stay exactly the same; up, down, total number in the middle (which in my opinion should not be visible till I voted, but that's another idea). The difference would be that clicking once on up (or down) increases (decreases) the total points by 1 - no change here - but holding down the button longer, raises the number of points that I plan to assign. There should be a limit to the number of points I can assign to one idea: 100 looks and sounds good and has no special meaning besides looking and sounding good. Another limit number could be better.
Holding down the up button could look something like this:
http://richardkolodziej.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/voteup.png
There is the total number of points that the idea already has, to its left is the number of points that I am left to assign and above that number, is the current number of points I want to give this idea.
Vice versa when holding down the down button:
http://richardkolodziej.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/votedown.png
The ability to change made votings is crucial for this idea because I could run out of points and then would need to reallocate them by taking away some up (or down) points from one idea and giving them to another.
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To this point, I didn't think about any potential flaws in my idea so please comment if I missed something.
This idea is somehow similiar to
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1161/ "Brainstorm: Vote Properly" but instead of giving people only 3 points per day (in my opinion, this would extremly deplete community involvement in Brainstorm because after assigning 3 votes, the most significant part is over and most people leave) I would give them as much as there are ideas.
There would be no force to additional cognitive effort for people, they could still just click once on up or down. But people who want to see selected ideas on the top for being crucial or stomp them in the ground for being so crappy, can assign more points and give their vote more weight.
