The summer can be a bit of a slow time in EVE, but for the CSM, the first week of August has seen a flurry of activity.
In about a week, CCP will hold its Release Planning Meeting, in which it will be decided what the devs will work on for the Winter expansion. As stakeholders, CSM is supposed to have some input into this process, and will be represented at the meeting by CCP Diagoras.
So the CSM had to decide what items in our backlog we wanted to push, and I volunteered to take the lead on this.
The method I chose was to crowdsource a priority list of all the backlog items, getting interested EVE players to vote on what was most important to them. You can read about the methodology and see the results here.
To do this I had to whip up some vote counting software, but this was not a difficult task -- we old programmers don't write code anymore, we just remember it and type it in again.
Once we had the raw list from the players, the CSM got together and divided the items into Small, Medium and Large items, trimmed the list of things we know CCP has already rejected (alas, the wiki lists I used for the original list were a little out of date), then winnowed the list to the best items, bumping up the position of items that multiple CSMs felt were particularly important.
Over the next week, we hope to get feedback from CCP about our list of items, and if possible iterate them into more easily implemented proposals. And then, we hope, CCP may see the light and devote significant resources to implementing the items that the players have once again demonstrated are important to them.
My thanks to the almost 300 people who helped the CSM create our list.
