Unless I misunderstand Bryce's comments, it seems to me, including the 
Inkscape user community in the brainstorming, would be a great source of ideas!
You surely will get a lot of suggestions out of that. To collect ideas from users you may want to use uservoice.com. E.g. the Firefox DevTools team uses this successfully to get some info about what users actually want.

Though from what I read here maintanance and automated testing currently seem to be higher prioritized than new functionality (which is definitely an important point). So maybe asking users should be deferred for one or two versions. Then the important point is of course to motivate your contributors to do these maintainance tasks, which can be achieved by updating and extending the wiki info for developers, splitting bigger changes into small tasks, do mentoring and code review. To get people to write automated tests you need to provide some API and example tests, which can be copied and adjusted by the people to cover other functionality.

Although I notice this was not cross-posted in the user mailing list.
Yes, while I'm 'just' a user I requested access to this list a while ago as there are some discussions like this one were I believe I can give some valuable feedback.

Sebastian, thanks again for the ideas, and I hope you hang around and help with hashing out plans.
Sure, I'm happy to help. I may not always answer immediately (like this time), though.

Sebastian
 
On 25 November 2014 at 03:13, Brynn <brynn@...3133...> wrote:
Hi Friends,
        Frequently there are posts in forums, where people give often
detailed, and often passionate requests and explanations for what is needed
to make Inkscape what they think it should be.  Unless I misunderstand
Bryce's comments, it seems to me, including the Inkscape user community in
the brainstorming, would be a great source of ideas!  Although I notice this
was not cross-posted in the user mailing list.  So there's a good chance I
don't understand.
        Anyway, if I did understand, I wanted to ask if I could post a
message in the forums, quoting Bryce's op on this topic, and requesting
input.
        Or if not, in lieu, could I post links to a few forum messages, on
the referenced wiki page, which seem to me to represent an overview of the
most frequent user requests?
        Thank you very much  :-)
brynn


--------------------------------------------------
From: "Bryce Harrington" <bryce@...961...>
Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2014 12:45 AM
To: <inkscape-devel@...6...>
Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Roadmap brainstorming for 0.92 and forward

> With 0.91 finally coming to a wrap soon, there are many different ideas
> on what to focus on next.  One thing we all agree on is turning the next
> few releases out more rapidly, 0.92 especially.
>
> To do this, we'll need to carefully select which new features to
> undertake each release; the more discriminating we are, the less risk of
> delay we'll face in these.  The less we undertake in parallel, the more
> quickly we can perfect what we do tackle.  The more we collaborate
> together as a team, the better the end result will be.
>
> The Inkscape roadmap has proven instrumental in prioritizing and
> organizing our effort in the past.  We can to use it again to help
> chart our course of development for the next several releases.
>
>    http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap
>
> I'd like to tackle this in three steps:  First, brainstorm and gather
> ideas into a big list.  Second, filter the list down to our most
> pressing needs.  And third, prioritize that list across the next
> half-dozen releases.
>
> I figure we should strive for one primary objective each release, with
> one secondary and perhaps a few tertiary items.  Of course, as we go
> we'll also have some surprises, early deliveries and the like; no need
> to turn those away.  But the idea is to focus Inkscape on what we as a
> project want to achieve each release.
>
> What do you think should be listed in our Roadmap?
>
> Bryce
>
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