We’ve received a few points of feedback about Fedora through the Mastodon account. It mostly takes the form of someone tagging the account and sharing their thoughts. Posts have ranged from complaints to constructive criticism to support questions.
Question for the community: is there a place within Fedora Project infra where we can receive this feedback? Is there a single place we can point them to in our replies on social media? Can it be as simple as pointing them to share feedback on this forum or should we be more specific with there they should go?
For me, my hope is that I can just point these folks to the forum and leave it at that. Otherwise it would be a bigger ask to have to hunt down the specific space of each part of the project that gets commented on and hope we get it right. But if there’s a specific place for this kind of thing, I’d like to know.
I’m not sure of the right answer. I want Project Discussion to be open and easy to join, and I want us to be receptive to and benefit from feedback, but I also don’t want:
a large number of a drive-through comments from people who aren’t committed, or
to create an expectation that everyone’s suggestion can be acted on (or will be addressed in the way the person hopes).
Offhand idea: what if we create a “Suggestion Box” category specifically for user ideas and feedback, were we can set expectations appropriately? (Under Ask Fedora, I think.)
I’m glad you bring this up, because ideally marketing works as a two-way street — not just communications out from the project, but also market insights, stakeholder feedback, user metrics, etc., feeding back in. With that in mind, I’m thinking the Suggestion Box should be “owned” by the Marketing team, and bringing insights from the feedback to various teams part of Marketing responsibilities. (I know, more work — but maybe also more interesting things to do that could help build the team further?)
I was thinking of something similar. What if we did a suggestion box thread similar to what we do for introductions right now? This can be a quarterly thread that’s owned by the Marketing Team and it would fulfill the job of giving us one link to share.
A thread could be better than an outright category because it’s one link that will set someone up to immediately provide input and it’s also gentle guardrails to stay in this suggestion box channel. The implication is that outside of the suggestions thread we’re working and are not obliged to just do what people say. We can also set the tone for how the feedback will be received at the top of the thread!
But at the same time we’ve gotten someone to make a FAS account, which is one step closer to contribution!
I do agree that we want to take our learnings and communicate that back into the Project, but I don’t want to go too far in the direction of almost being QA triage. I think that’s outside of the scope of what the team should be focused on. That’s not to say that is what is being suggested!! I just want to guard against having expectations that are too far or too technical for us (or maybe it’s just me? lol).
Sorry, I’m not following the ambiguity here — which team?
I do agree that any such suggestion box does open a door for people to come pile on something like “such and such desktop environment sucks”. We’d want to moderate strictly.