I would have thought that this thread was more about application developers and users contributiong to their development. Not so much about system level development and users filing bugs against system components.


In fact, as a user who does file bugs against system components (or contributes information because I'm affected) I feel I'm very well treated recently. I get all the information I need. Many of the bugs I'm following right now are already fixed and a new binary will be provided in an upcoming SSU. In other cases, I get in-depth information about why things don't work out the way I want. Recently I even found a fixed version of an application I had problems with right there in bugzilla, as an attachment, before the SSU came out. From my personal POV, that's good. Not great, not over-the-top-exceptional-let's dance, but solid and good.
Just to set things in proportion: There were five software upgrades for the N800 in 2008, all of which fixed bugs I personally had encountered, some of which introduced new features.
For my S60 phone, I got exactly one software update in 2008, which fixed nothing and introduced not one single new feature. There are dozens of well-known bugs in this phone's software, but no place to file them. There's no development whatsoever going on on Nokias side, no support, nothing - even though the user base is much larger and it would really, really pay off in terms of customer satisfaction to fix a bug or two.
Comparing my S60-experience to my Maemo-experience, it's like a completely different company. Let's not forget what we have, how good it really is.

It's different with applications. I find it difficult to find the correct place to suggest improvements or report errors with non-Nokia applications... Sometimes all I have is an email address or a forum nick and I'm not sure if these developers want to accept my input at all.

So one thing to be considered to help community development (always defining "community" as application developers and users' interaction with them) is to really encourage user feedback. (Bugzilla/Extras would be the place for it.) Also, as stated before in this thread, users should really go and actively search for the appropriate feedback channel for the application they recently fell in love with. Don't just tell the author that the icon is missing - also tell him that you spent some time looking for this feedback channel. Afterwards, suggest it would be cool if he hosted his project somewhere (garage?) in a way that allows access to the sources.

I admit I'm too lazy with this. I accept poor quality software and don't react as long as I'm not invited to. Bugzilla I see as a friendly invitation. If the software doesn't even contain an "about" with a real name and a working email address, I don't think my feedback is welcome. I'll change that. I'll try to get on people's nerves even though they obviously try to avoid just that.

I promise.