Let me put a word in here as a developer on the dx team.

I receive ~1 bug email per minute in all 24 hours per day. That's ~1440
emails per day; and that's just counting the ones from Launchpad. I
filter them and skim them to work with them as effectively as possible,
but as you can expect stuff does slip through. I try my best to reply
sensibly where applicable - but easy math explains why I need to be very
selective in where I spend time writing up a reply. - And there is also
code to be written, lest not forget! ;-)

Considering also that I subscribe to several high volume mailing lists,
and spend more or less all my wake time in a range of IRC channels; it
can not come as a surprise that someone not using all their wake time
similarly will have a (very) hard time following what's going on. Sure,
some things are discussed privately, but the majority of the information
flow is actually in public - due to our distributed nature it just takes
an extraordinary amount of effort to follow it.

For people (like myself ~2 years ago) only following the mainstream info
points like news sites, blogs, twitter, forums, and the occasional LP
bug, it is true that they are partially left in the dark. They are maybe
seeing 2% of the total information flow. The Community Team (and news
sites) are doing a grand job of trying to better this situation, but
there's only so much they can do.

Let me finish off by noting how I've seen people still succeed despite
my grim outlines above - community champions who've shown that it is
indeed possible :-)

The common patterns are : 1) Spending lots of time on Unity-related
projects launchpad, triaging bugs, commenting, and most importantly
*proposing solutions* (patches, icons, wireframes, etc). 2) Start small
- the mentioned bug about moving the launcher is a *big* deal - having
complex ramifications for the user experience and being technically
challenging. 3) Engage on IRC. Be friendly, pro-active, and persevering
in  talking to developers and designers on IRC. I can assure you they
want to help (if they don't respond don't assume they are evil - see
first paragraph ;-)). 4) Be focused. Find your main area of interest and
stick to that. You'll never get to follow everything that goes into the
distro. Even the flood of information I read each day only gives me a
small window into what's related for Unity - but Unity, in the grander
scope of things, is only small bolt in between the countless bits and
bobs that make up Ubuntu.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/882274

Title:
  Community engagement is broken

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