Quoting Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>:
Presumably each community has a clear and specific leader to steer them in the right direction and make sure there is the necessary cross communication with other groups.
Yes, we will need people to take leadership roles. This tends to happen organically on -devel, although I don't see so much of it on -user yet. I had been hoping we'd see some power users (aside from bulia) emerge and start mentoring the others.
I think this release was unusually rough because of the longer development time. Perhaps the prerelease cycle needs to tuned a little, and the prerelease needs to be out for a while (like a week) without any reported problems before being retagged and rereleasing the same files as the actual release (and I thought this was roughly what was happening already but was a little more rushed this time around for whatever reasons).
Unfortunately part of the problem was that many people decided to wait for the "final" release before trying it out.
Which is a consequence of normal human psychology, I think. I'm not sure how to encourage users to "take the grenade" of the prereleases. Maybe encouraging a testing community, as such, could help.
Ideally I would like to see a deliberate usability review of some form take place as part of every release cycle.
Yes. All for that.
If enough Developers lurk and occasionally respond to issues on the testing list it could work.
Yeah. I think all the core developers should be subscribed to the testing list, at least.
-mental