Fair point.

There are reasons to think things will improve (or kep improving, depending how you see it):

- There is a trend of improvement already. Now we are discussing and disclosing sooner and more often than before.

- The Maemo SW team is bigger, and even if the amount of work has also increased there is more chances to get time to discuss with the community.

- Until Harmattan we are in these phases of consolidation of the platform, with a lot of novelties that come bundled with new hardware. New hardware means in practice a lot more confidentiality. But once the basics of the platform are well covered then it's easier to discuss about enhancements here and there.

- Also during Fremantle and Harmattan the Maemo SW team plans to bring that open dvelopment for the open source projects, and the discussion on features affecting the open parts should be quite transparent.

- The whole Nokia is moving slowly but steadly to a more open communication thanks not only to the small but relevant successes of Maemo but also thanks to the Symbian Foundation rollout, the assimilation of the Trolltech "spirit" and the overall trends of increasing openness and beta culture in the industry.

- Also very important, in the meantime the Maemo community has earned a big respect not only from the Maemo SW team but also from other parts of Nokia that are seeing that there is something unique going on here.

Bigger volumes would play a big role as well. Those of us swimming in bugs.maemo.org know that it's remarkable that a feature request gathers more than 50 votes. However, if we go to an average product manager that number is anything but impressive.

Promoting the more the current voting feature in bugs.maemo.org would increase the numbers. Having a more user friendly tool like Ubuntu's Brainstorm would increase them even more? We have good reasons to think that Fremantle and Harmattan will bring a lot more users to this platform, being the average profile less geeky but still heavy Internet users, social and open to get involved in exciting stuff.

All this makes me think that indeed a separate and very user friendly tool would be helpful. But it's more work, it's probably also a new engine, probably new headaches... and this is why we (all) need to be sure that this is the right thing to do, and do it well.

One comment, my gut feeling tells me that if we have a tool for feature requests, all requests should be handled there. This gateway between Brainstorm and Bugzilla sounds like too confusing to users and even our own product managers or developers in charge. But maybe I'm wrong. Anyway th first decision is whether a new tool would be needed or not.