Re: Open Source - Enterprise Consumer Participation -- request for Article

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

This is generally nice and positive and useful.

However, I'd avoid simply stating that we want more direct feedback from
users other than what we get in bugzilla and mailing lists. We get a
lots of extra unstructured feedback at the moment but it's rarely
useful. Saying that we want more of it just enrages the people who
didn't get results so far.

What is useful is 
- Informed users, talking to us on existing mailing lists.
- Users talking about very specific issues, on bugzilla.
- Distros giving feedback based on their own mailing lists and bug
reports, and on their informed priorities.
- For more wide-reaching feedback, users taking part in usability
studies or requirements gathering, guided by informed people.
This is the stuff that doesn't happen often much because it's a lot of
work. Without the guidance, regular users just aren't very capable of
providing useful freeform feedback. Users don't like to hear that
though.




-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com