Allow me to provide an example for how this kind of transparent development can take place without compromising development efficiency from my experience. Dave Bauer and Jun Yamog have taken a great deal of interest in using ETP for their own projects. They contacted Luke Pond with a lot of their fixes, suggestions and questions. As the three of them have poured over the code, decided on improvements and culled a feature set, they've decided to build ETP2.
Before beginning development, Luke wrote up a preliminary design document and posted it on the boards to solicit feedback. If anyone is interested in adding to the list or in helping to develop the package they are free to ask or post suggestions.
Talli, this description exactly fits what I'm talking about. A handful of interested people kicked around ideas, put together a design doc, and posted it to the boards in order to get feedback.
A slightly cleaner way to do it would've been to solicit interest from others first, inviting people with a serious interest in contributing actively to the upgrade to join the effort. They might've gotten a couple of other folks involved at an early who would've been willing to roll up their sleeves and get down to it.
But as you describe it, the process has met my basic bottom-line criteria for sufficient transparency - a proposal is being made and comments solicited before implementation has begun.
