In addition to doing bug commit in Launchpad, some of the “community bugs” could be also reflected in Forum/Ubuntu Weekly/Ubuntu Planet posts (and that’s where blogs are still highly useful), so the issue will be exposed for more “general” broader public.

It would bring less technically inclined folk to discussions about the issue and may bring more ideas about to how it could be solved/taken care of.

Some obvious differences: a bug (as tracked by Launchpad) has an overall description that can be updated anytime, a status, maybe an assignee, and an unthreaded series of comments. It’s also not as straightforward for an interested party to subscribe all conversations held in bugs for a project as it is to subscribe to a mailing list or the planet’s RSS feed.

These differences might be a good or bad thing for this purpose, I’m not sure. But I think you should definitely treat this as an experiment, and keep an open mind about what the results of this experiment will be.

Perhaps “filing a bug” which has “status” and “importance” fields will generate conflict and adversarial conversations. Perhaps “here’s a problem for us as a community to fix” will encourage collaboration and consensus. Perhaps issues that might have been forgotten will now be addressed because they are formally tracked. Perhaps arguments that would normally fade due to lack of interest will be sustained indefinitely because they never get “closed”. Or something else entirely, I don’t know

I hope the experiment goes well!

Credit goes to Mark Shuttleworth