User:Melamrawy (WMF)/Community collaboration best practices

About
Designing for the community vs designing with the community is a challenge found in most platforms/products that are community based, yet they have paid staff to do certain roles. How do communities and dedicated staff come to common decisions together? How does staff help community solve their issues by providing their guidance rather than their direct solutions?

Wikimedia movement is not alone. Other platforms and products also have their share of conflicts and lessons to learn, while trying to better understand how to work on projects together.

In this space below, I will be interviewing a series of folks from different platforms, or advisors who work on process developments, to realize and learn about best practices. Feel free to ping or answer the questions directly, if this sounds relevant to you :-). Thanks, Moushira

Questions

 * 1) In your platform, what types of different user groups exists?
 * 2) How far do core community members affect product decisions?
 * 3) How far do you adapt your products based on community suggestions?
 * 4) As a casual observation, how happy is your core community with the product decisions you make?
 * 5) How do you release new features, that didn't stem from community suggestions?
 * 6) How do designers on your team, (or you, if you are a designer) perceive community comments?
 * 7) How would you wish for things to change?
 * 8) Any comments you would like to add?