“The world’s first crowdsourced tablet” was the headline for our Jolla Tablet campaign on Indiegogo in November. Stating that something is done for the first time ever in human history is for sure a bold statement, and we of course want to live by it. In this we want to explain this in more detail.

As said many times in our earlier posts, one of Jolla’s mottos is Do It Together (DIT). For us that’s basically the same thing as crowdsourcing. This all comes from the fact that we want to create a product you want to use. In order to make that happen, we aim to be as transparent as possible, which is one of Jolla’s values, and also ask for your involvement.

Progressing in monthly cycles

In Jolla, we work in monthly iterations based on Agile practices where we develop and integrate new features into our product baseline and for new software releases. Every month we host an iteration day with all the teams from Helsinki, Tampere, Hong Kong, and around the world.  This is not only for product development, but also for planning next steps for the whole company for the coming month, and to review the previous month.

We also involve our community in these monthly iterations (meaning all of you!). This happens through together.jolla.com where we directly engage with you.

Through this forum, we invite you to propose new ideas, comment what is already there and very importantly cast your vote for the ideas you find important. We scan all the most voted ideas before the iteration days and decide together what are the potential feature candidates we feed into the iterations. If the suggested idea goes through, we take it forward and in case we see it being out-of-scope we put it aside at that point. Be the decision either way, we will inform about this in together.jolla.com.

In together.jolla.com you are able to follow up our development and finally discover when the feature is planned to hit the product. Note that in some cases the feature may come to the Jolla smartphone even before the tablet is out. We want to make sure that the feature set in the final product and the creation of it is in balance and logical. We also need to make selections between different options, and there the voting plays a key role. Some, even very good ideas are likely to be put aside at certain moments, if they don’t fit into our project scope at the time. It is sad, but inevitable, but we’ll keep you informed, transparently.

 Your input is essential!

Here’s in a nutshell how the process goes:

• Keep posting your ideas and participate in together.jolla.com, we listen!
• We will pre-filter your suggestions before each monthly iteration planning
• In our iteration planning day we go into detailed planning and kick off creation for the chosen ideas
• You can read from together.jolla.com what is going to happen for each of the ideas
• Finally we aim to blog about what has happened during the iteration process, and also talk about the ideas raised to give you more in-depth info

Our new official Jolla Blog aims to raise the transparency to a whole new level. In the new iteration post series we’ll also aim to talk about what was funny, what was difficult, what made us laugh, did we cry of pain or joy, and so on. Developing anything new is a journey with uphills and downhills. Join us in days of victory and also in humble days of great learnings from mistakes! We are expecting both and everything in between.

Keep focus on software request

Finally, a reminder that Jolla is mainly a software company, which means that we need to rely on our partners developing hardware for us. This will cause some unfortunate limitations as we have limited possibilities to add new hardware features to our products. In practice this means that for our upcoming, very first Jolla tablet, we are likely no longer able to add new hardware features. We had to make our choice quickly about the platform in order to get it kicked off into development. You can read more about this from Carsten’s blog post.

Some of your suggestions might become relevant in the future and can be revisited and taken into account again if they fit our roadmap. Also remember that sales start is definitely not the end of the development, and regular Sailfish OS updates will follow.

Keep on contributing! We want to develop Jolla and Sailfish OS so that you love it, and this we can’t do without your input!

To find feature requests and to post your own go to together.jolla.com, and use tags “jolla-tablet” and “feature-request”. For general instructions for together.jolla.com go here.