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

[Sebastian Dziallas]

Walter Bender wrote:
> It isn't obvious at first glance why this particular site appeals to
> you. Could you describe its features and the problems you think they
> address?

It is the one I came across and a quick research (not very deep, 
admittedly) didn't result in many comparable alternatives - that's also 
why I asked for alternatives in the end.

What I believe is: *we need to make it easy to submit feedback*

The feedback at sl.o address was a beginning, but I think we need to 
explore other possibilities, too. GetSatisfaction looks - to me - like a 
good way of offering our users an easy, well designed interface, where 
they can enter their requests & issues.

I mentioned some of its features already below (like the various kinds 
of feedback, the possibility of making the current state on an issue 
easily clear enough,m...). However, I think if we promote such a 
solution well enough, it might help us to get feedback even from those 
people, who're probably not that experienced with open source projects 
or even feared of entering a ticket in trac ("what the heck is a bug?", 
"why do I need an account here?" "what's this all about?",...).

--Sebastian

> thanks.
>
> -walter
>
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:35 AM, Sebastian Dziallas<sebastian at when.com>  wrote:
>> 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
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