Fedora disconnection?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Gian Paolo Mureddu
<gmureddu at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:
> There has been a heated discussion over several threads in
> www.fedoraforum.org about how disconnected some users feel from the
> development team, as well as a general "lack of direction" in Fedora's
> leadership. The latest of these discussions started about an article (posted
> a few months back here in the marketing list) about PackageKit and from
> there it spanned a rather heated discussion about Fedora and a perceived
> increasing developers<-->users gap.

What exactly do the people who feel disconnected want?  Will they be
content just knowing that their opinions are heard? Communication is a
project wide stumbling block. Developers get frustrated at just trying
to talk among themselves, we certainly aren't going to require that
all the developers try to track general user discussion lists and
forums. We can probably do a better job at communication, on a number
of fronts but such effort can only go so far.  Rambling complaint
threads on a forum or even the mailing list are just going to get
ignored by the vast majority of people. Letting users pretend that
participating in these sorts of long discussion amongst themselves
will result in developer action is a disservice to everyone.

Or is the an unspoken expectation in the discontented userbase that
popular userbase opinion is suppose to drive the direction of the
project?  Let me dispel that right now. Popular userbase opinion will
not control the direction of any technology development that
individual contributors want to use.  That is not going to change.
Here's the deal. Fundamentally Fedora runs on the power of its
contributor-base... not its userbase.  If there are group of users who
feel they are not being served, they have the ability to organize and
get involved as contributors. We could do a better job of encouraging
those sorts of users to grow into contributors.

So knowing what should be done, really comes down to knowing what the
discontented users are expecting.

-jef