Hey everyone, today we added a new category called #community:ideas and updated the following parts of the OP:
Each project will be identified up front as being in demand by creating a topic within the appropriate section of the forum (#community:ideas). Members of the community will vote and should the idea have sufficient support, it will be included in a poll (in #community:polls). The person who wins the poll will raise a Request For Proposals (RFP). This will be posted in RFPs.
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- Potential ideas for the CEP are raised in #community:ideas. Community members can use their limited amount of votes to vote for ideas they would like to see become RFPs. Every few weeks, the top 5 ideas with the most votes will be included in a poll (in #community:polls). The voting period for the poll will last for 1 week. The person who wins the poll will document their idea and add it into the RFPs category within the forum. Each new RFP will have its own topic where the community and the prospective applicant(s) can ask questions to clarify any points.
The advantage of this approach is that people who want to suggest ideas won’t need to include a poll in the topic they create (instead, MaidSafe will take care of creating polls that include the ideas with the most votes) and also it will be much easier for us to see which ideas have more community support (because we will be able to sort the list of topics in the Ideas category by number of votes). With individual polls in each topic, it would be a bit harder to figure out which ideas have more community support (since we would have to compare the results of each poll individually).
We will be testing out this new approach for the next CEP. We have made a few decisions that we think might work well as a starting point.
Every few weeks, the top 5 ideas with the most votes will be included in a poll (in #community:polls).
Depending on the number of ideas that are submitted, we might do polls for selecting new RFPs more often and on a regular basis (e.g. every 2 weeks). Initially, we think we should just do 1 poll every few weeks for the first few times we run through the process. We would rather start small and scale up initially as going too fast with too many projects could turn a bit messy if we don’t stay on top of things.
Also, a poll might include more than 5 options (e.g. we could include the top 10 ideas with the most votes) if many ideas are submitted around the same time.
Community members can use their limited amount of votes to vote for ideas they would like to see become RFPs.
The way the Discourse Voting plugin works is that each topic in the #community:ideas category will have a Vote button next to it:
Forum users have a limited amount of votes that they can use to vote for ideas they would like to see become RFPs. If a user runs out of votes, they can cancel some of their active votes by clicking on the Vote button again. This will let them reclaim one of their votes. They’ll then be able to use it to vote for another idea.
Also, when a topic in #community:ideas is closed or archived (e.g. because an idea that was suggested by a community member won one of the polls and got submitted as an RFP), the votes are released to the users and can be applied to other ideas.
Here are the initial settings we chose for the Voting plugin:
Trust level 1 users can have 5 active votes at a given time, while trust level 2 users and above can have 10 active votes. The reason for this is to make it a bit harder for people to vote using multiple accounts (reaching trust level 1 is a lot easier compared to reaching trust level 2).
Please keep in mind that these settings are just a starting point and we are definitely open to making changes to them based on feedback we receive from the community 
Feel free to let us know if you have any questions about this process.