[IAEP] Lets Get Satisfaction (was: Community Influence)

[Sebastian Dziallas]

Hi everybody,

it's really good to see this discussion getting off the ground. While 
being at LinuxTag, we discussed with some folks how to improve the way 
of getting feedback from our users, without putting too much barriers in 
their way.

So while looking around and at various issue tracking systems, I 
discovered GetSatisfaction. I had seen that before already, but wasn't 
sure of its current state. There you go: http://getsatisfaction.com/

GetSatisfaction is also used by other open source projects like Songbird 
(which might also be a good place to an idea how such an instance looks 
like): http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird

So as you can see, users gain various possibilities of interacting with 
the developers here. They can ask questions, report issues and so on. 
Others go ahead and comment and vote an entry up and down so that 
developers can see what's more and what's less important. Finally, a 
developer can also put a "we're working on it" or "we're aware of this 
problem" flag on an entry, to make the current state more obvious.

In my opinion, this might be a good way of inviting more people to give 
us feedback (I'm not suggesting to abandon trac, I guess we should use 
that to track issues ourselves, too). For example, if we created such an 
instance and mentioned it in the next press release, I'm pretty sure it 
could work out well.

Well, GetSatisfaction is a company. So they have various plans (also a 
free one, which looks like it would probably already be enough), while I 
guess we could also contact them directly.

So. What do you think? Is this worth trying out? Any alternatives?

I've already a personal account with them, but how do we proceed?

Cheers,
--Sebastian