I was impressed by the simplicity of 37signals' Iterations when I saw their original post, it's a basic web app used to track their own internal ideas and feature requests, and also to help decide who's going to work on those features, but that was as far as I got with it, until I was reminded of it a few weeks later when listening to an episode of techzing¹.

[caption id="attachment_539" align="aligncenter" width="529" caption="More on the jabber bot later"][/caption]

I face somewhat of an uphill battle trying to encourage my staff to come up with their own ideas, initiatives and suggestions and thought something like this might help promote that kind of thing, so I set about creating a plugin for redmine, the issue tracker we use. I'm sure it's not quite as sexy as 37signals', but I'm quite happy with it and it's working out ok so far. [caption id="attachment_541" align="aligncenter" width="538" caption="Tracking ideas that aren't necessarily project based"][/caption]

I'm far from a skilled Rails developer, nevermind a redmine plugin developer, but if anyone would like to give the plugin a try, it's up on github. It's been developed against the redmine trunk, so your mileage may vary, but I would appreciate anyone giving the code a once over, tidying bits up, making it more rails/redmine friendly etc, and sending me a pull request.

[caption id="attachment_542" align="aligncenter" width="538" caption="Users can comment, +1 or offer to work on an iteration"][/caption]

¹ I recently started listening to podcasts again and I was very disappointed to find out StackOverflow have given up with the podcasting and You Look Nice Today are very few and far between, but after reading an inspiring blog post, I thought I'd give Jason's podcast a try. Slowly working my way through a few months worth of back catalog, quite enjoying it, worth a listen if you're into that kind of thing.