launchpad helpLaunchpad is in an interesting position with regard to community dynamics. On the one hand, we want to support the ability of project leaders to lead - to define where a project is headed, what the priorities are, and what needs to be done. On the other hand, we believe that one of the great strengths of the free software world is diversity, the ability of fringe members of a community to come up with brilliant ideas that start out as unpopular but ultimately become some of the best features of a given application.
This really does happen.
So in Launchpad, you don't have to be an official member of a product or project group to register your specification - just go ahead and add it to the listing. This is quite deliberate. It encourages diversity in a project and lets anybody chip in their ideas. Of course, the project leaders can easily mark a specification as being "Not" a priority for them - don't be discouraged, if you can find other people interested in the feature, you can still use Blueprint to keep track of your progress. Make yourself the approver of your spec if you're the person who came up with the idea, and see if you can excite other developers to help you define and implement it.
We go to some lengths to make this possible. We've even invented a distributed revision control system (Bazaar) so that you can branch the mainline code, form a team, collaborate around your own feature implementation, and then land it later in a blaze of glory when the project leaders realise what a great feature it is after all...
Specifications are open to anybody in the community to contribute. You should never mark somebody else's specification as "obsolete" or "superseded". If you are a project leader you are welcome to say that a feature is Low priority, or even Not a priority, but please allow others to take free software where it suits them best.
