Re: Project Proposal: GNOME Innovation

[Jud Craft <craftjml gmail com>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Luis Menina wrote:

> 7. Who would do the work ? As someone already explained, this is not how
> things work in a community. The ones who decide are not the ones who want,
> but the ones who actually do the job.

I do agree with most of your points, with this caveat:

There is a difference between community support and user feedback.
Not every user will be part of the community, and many non-community
users may have good feedback.

The goal should be to involve as many users as possible, while
-obtaining good feedback- from those who otherwise will not be
involved.  This necessitates changing the barrier of entry for
non-community members.

Obviously the big "post whatever you want!" system is not be the most
effective way to do it.  But there must be some way to gain
non-technical user feedback that does not involve developer
infrastructure.  (The dependence upon Bugzillas and Wikis -exclusively
and solely- for useful user feedback seems to be a free software
phenomenon.  Is there no other way of gaining feedback?)

I think the discussion is worth pursuing, that's all.  It is a gap in
the support model of the free software community.