Shuttleworth’s last post expressed a nice intent: coordinating (almost) releases and sharing work. The issue to be tackled here is the traditional fragmentation which constitutes both the force (being more creative and less erhm.. controllable by some people 
and the weakness of Linux distributions development.
As it’s usual for Mark‘s posts, the article is long, well thought and insightful, so I recommend you to read it.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/288
What I’d like to point out is that keeping the discussions on individual blogs doesn’t make very easy for ideas to flow around. In my point of view, we really need a dedicated forum to tackle this kind of issues. (a mailing list could also work, but a forum is a quite more powerful tool)
My idea is that a distribution neutral website should be set up, with a little set of forums dedicated to discuss the issues with fragmentation and how to get rid of them.
Note: please note, I am not proposing to put a website up myself. This should be an initiative and common effort from the respective communities.
To tackle the inevitable noise, those would be memberlist-access forums. Everyone could read them, but only a selected number of people would be allowed to post. Ideally, each of the main distribution leaders would be given access and the ability to add/remove to/from the memberlist any additional person of their choice. For main distributions I mean not only Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Suse, but also main derivatives, along with a set of smaller but equally important distributions like Mandriva for example (which demostrated itself to be capable of meaningful innovations).
If an access-list forum seems elitist to you then you’re right, it is. In the same site, another set of publicly writeable forums may be set, to allow ideas random people ideas to be expressed and maybe be picked up and tackled in the private forums. And by the way we should provide a place to allow people to globally flame about Mono and Ubuntu-Debian-relationship, shouldn’t we ? 
Shall such a website be done ? Would it help getting rid of the mess ?
I’d keep the forums scheme as simple as:
Access-listed forums
- Announcements
- Discussion
- Development Issues
Public forums
- Announcements
- Discussion
- Development Issues
So what do you think ? Does a place like this already exist ?
You raise a very good point.
I’d disagree about the forum though. These are long posts, and correctly belong in the blog of the poster. A better idea would be a method for aggregating these into a thread, and putting it up on a planet of some sort. This way Mark could tag this as “release-cycle lts linux” for example, and the planet could present these “threads” in a forum-style view (one for each tag), rather than the traditional planet-style listing of recent entries.
Yep, I agree with the post above, an aggregator site is the way to go.