Communication between developers and users

[Tom Chance]

Hello all,

I've been thinking about one of the roles of Quality Teams... communication. 
Supposedly, and hopefully, Quality Teams provide a bridge between developers 
and users where Bugzilla and developer mailing lists aren't sufficient. I'd 
appreciate people's thoughts on this, so we can better develop how we work.

Two examples of where this is needed come to mind:


1) An application in KDE could be replaced by a new app.

Take Kolourpaint and KPaint, for example. Or the Noatun / Kaboodle / Amarok / 
Juk / Kaffeine / KMplayer mess, for another. Clearly, the decision shouldn't 
just be up to developers, and many users will have a lot to say about this 
sort of issue. But currently they can't, really, have any useful input. Read 
this bug report, for example:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76915

Lots of opinions are raised, and then the users are shut out of the 
discussion. (correctly, according to the uses of Bugzilla and mailing lists) 


2) A large architecutral change is discussed.

Take aRts as the case in point here. Should KDE stick with aRts, or change to 
Gstreamer, or NMM, or some other audio framework? This is a long-term 
decision with major implications, and yet to an even greater extent than app 
changes, users have very little input.

So how can we provide a space for users and developers to interact? The 
original idea was that Quality Team members would discuss on the developer 
mailing lists and on "community sites", relaying messages between users and 
developers. But

a) Is this enough?
b) Is this even happening?

I'd appreciate your thoughts, so we can continue to improve this project.

Regards,
Tom