I'll give you some answers:
The main problem is the lack of hands, I still do most of the job by myself
(maybe the "lack of transparency" mentioned is just me being shy about that).
Also it may have been a problem that I traveled way too much this year, I'm
sorry if I wasn't very responsive lately.
Since I assumed that the lack of hands may have been caused by the perceived
difficulty in stepping up as a developer and start sending patches, I've been
working a lot (and with the help of Aklis and others) in making the code
accessible and easy to contribute to. We will keep working this way.
Nowadays the core component of the work are the package helpers:
http://bzr.trisquel.info/package-helpers/trunk/files
They are *very* simple scripts that modify the source package and compile it
for Trisquel. Still, IIRC only one helper was contributed by the community.
Regarding how to motivate hackers into sending more patches... well, help
make the system better should be enough. Maybe we should do a public "call
for hackers" with the help of the FSF and other friend associations around?
Regarding the web site bugs, I'm right now working to make it more wiki-like,
in the sense that it should be possible to maintain it without the need of an
admin. The blocker for that now is the translation process, which requires
some changes in the drupal code we are running on. We are close with this.
There have been some volunteers asking to help in developing the site, which
I maintain by myself too, but that is just too critical for me to open up
easily to volunteers. We need to come up with some middle ground to empower
the community in maintaining the site without risks.
Going back to communication issues, one problem I now have is that the forums
are way too big for me to monitor, so please those of you who are more
involved use the devel list to discuss the important stuff, or link there any
important discussion going on. I just stumbled upon this discussion because
I'm working to fix the lists-forum sync system.
That would be for development communication, we do need to also improve our
community communications, as in writing more news (not only for big events as
we do now, but also a sort of project blog, and more participation in social
networks). As mentioned, it is not that I prefer to code than to run the
community, it is that code alone is already too much work (as the bug list
testifies for). I don't like the term "community manager", but it would be
nice to have some help in that field.
Regarding how to report bugs, SirGrant as usual provides some good
documentation about it, but I'd like to add a rule to the list, maybe to be
put first: _include_ _a_ _fix_
This is a small community by all means, and the development part of it is
even smaller, so if you find a bug and you are going through the trouble of
reporting it, please at least go to the trouble of looking for a solution and
attach it. Ideally, write a package helper, but if you at least link to a
site discussing how to fix it, it will make the issue much easier to fix.
Also, bear in mind that we are not a big fancy project like Ubuntu (yet), so
we cannot afford to debug, patch and compile every possible package (there
are over 15000 source packages, and if we nitpick we can find bugs in most of
them), and 99% of the problems come from upstream anyway. So don't hesitate
to send the bug *directly* upstream if that's the case.
With the exception of freedom related issues, as a general rule we should
discard bugs for packages that are not preinstalled in the isos, or even for
all that come unmodified from upstream. Sounds sad, but unless we find
volunteers or the donations/memberships grow enough to hire some hackers,
there is not much we can do about those.
