Okay, I watched with Ire as Eugenia brought an Off Topic discussion into desktop-devel list [1]. Among the first responses was a request to take the discussion to a more fitting forum. ignored.. After the thread goes on she is in more or less sharp words being told that she's wasting bandwidth and asked to be quiet, and things calm down.
For a few hours, until she posts another incoherent ramble [2] to her weblog (Oh, sorry. "Journalistic Outlet with Proffessional Attitude") [3]. This ramble was spotted by Thom Holwerda who does a short analysis of the situation [4] and suggests a solution.
However, Right now, I want to adress some of the points that Eugenia so delightfully steps into with her self-centric complaints about being ignored.
*) She asks about a way to make her voice heard.
*) She wants to post her requests, blog it on her site (sorry, "Write professional and welformualted articles about it") and get enough "voices" that developers will feel forced to implement it.
*) Failing that, she wants material enough that "Gnome sucks because it ignores all theese voices" for future articles. (that will give her ad revenue).
As several people stated in the thread, the kind of people who read her journals, or find dedicated voting sites (or bugzilla) are -not- the average joe user of a Gnome desktop, and therefore give a very slanted view of things.
However, lets see about what we actually -do- in this case, in order to see if we can make this a bit better.
a) Feature Requests from the desktop [5]
b) Feature Requests from a web page [6]
c) Feedback from devs
Here comes the tricky part. No bugs peter out and die out of obsolesence. They must all be explicitly closed, with a comment from a developer. This means that sooner or later all bugs have to be cared for, and your Feature Request will be seen and answered.
There are also the Bugsquad and BugDay [7] projects, along with gnome-love [8] to take care of this vital part.
Adding to this, Jacub Steiner recently wrote a very good piece on Getting functionality implemented by a volounteer hacker [9] that also caters to the aspiring Feature Requestee's.
The solution to this "issue" of Ignored Whining Webloggers without the capabilty of coherently expressing themselves lies -not- in duplicating this effort. Such a solution only fragments our already lacking resources, and doesn't solve an issue.
As a developer, you value consistent approaches. You don't want to have to scourge some journalists hodgepodge forums after obscure bugreports, you want them delivered in a way that you can track them and contact the reporters for more info. You especially do not want to see somone else voting to make more work for you by duplicating pre-existing issues out of sheer laziness.
So, in order to get this down as a bit more concrete suggestions.
What can we do about it?
*) make "Feature request" more obvious. Alan had a great suggestion about "did this help?" . Combine with automatic filtering and duplicate checking, and we have a good entrypoint.
*) Make Bugzilla Feature Request more simple to find.
*) Polish up Jacubs text and put it in on the introduction page on Bugzilla for Feature Requests.
*) take harder moderating steps towards people on desktop-devel.
*) Make "join gnome" easier, smoother, and simpler. Spoonfeed people, if need be.
*) Seek refuge in great people such as Anne Østergaard[10] and do not become gender biased or prejudiced.
[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-March/thread.html#00078
[2] http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9933
[3] http://www.osnews.com/
[4] http://www.expert-zone.com/index.php?module=announce&ANN_user_op=view&ANN_id=750
[5] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-March/msg00191.html
[6] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/simple-bug-guide.cgi
[7] http://developer.gnome.org/projects/bugsquad/
[8] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove
[9] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php/Design/Speccing
[10] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2005-March/msg00007.html