If the rocky reception of KDE 4 has done anything, it has forced the KDE project to realize it needs to listen to users more closely. One of the first results of this realization is the new Community Working Group (CWG). Announced at Akademy, the recently concluded annual KDE conference, the CWG was described as designed "to act as a central point of contact by being available to communicate user needs and concerns to developers, and developer intentions and plans to users." The CWG is still being organized; to find out more about its plans, we contacted Anne Wilson and Juan Carlos Torres, two of the group's five initial members.

Wilson is best-known for answering questions about KDE on a variety of forums. She says that KDE has realized the need to improve communication with users for some time. "Everyone, users and developers alike, had known and admitted that the current system of documentation was not good enough. That is not to belittle current documentation, but it is necessarily written before the general public have used the application and fed back their problems and worries.

"The KDE 4 situation this spring was, in a sense, the last straw. We had been aware for a long time that there was a lack of user-centric resources, but since KDE 3 had been around for so long there were always people who could pick up the issues and help out. KDE 4 opened up a whole new ball-game.

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