Your idea is a great one, except... I was going to say "you can't see the forest for the trees", but actually it's the other way around. I think you're too focused on the big picture (communicating with the community) to see that smaller steps can help a great deal.
I haven't seen any small step solution that improves the situation, though. Unless there's two way communication then it's the WMF telling people "here's what we're going to do" without any way for them to give us proper feedback. We can't possibly host discussions with all of our communities, and it's really unfair to only select the biggest ones.
Sure, it's great to have lots of peopled involved in the discussion leading to a big change, but it's not bad at all to have some people involved in the decision making, but _everybody_ in the loop about the decision taken. Think of it as law-making: some people gather, discuss and take a decision, which is then made public for all interested parties before it comes into force.
I really feel that the blog is the best place for announcements like this. At least everyone can give feedback in the comments. It's a single communication location that has a relatively small amount of traffic that is very specifically focused on community matters.
As I said to Tilman: don't ignore or postpone small fixes just because you're waiting for a great new version sometime in the future.
That's why I recommended the ambassador's route. It's the best interim solution proposed so far.
If we can't crowdsource this, then it's never going to happen. This is how our community scales. We have less people on the entire Wikimedia staff than we have projects (by a very large number). We can't possibly hire enough people to properly cover discussions in every single project.
This makes sense and is probably the right solution for the Community->WMF channel. However, the 2 directions need not be perfectly symmetrical. It is far more important for the WMF->Community channel to be reliable, timely and deliver the message as close to the destination as possible. There are many reasons for this, the most important one being that the WMF takes decisions that affect the community, but not the other way around.
I think the most important thing is to enable the communities to give feedback. There's a number of decent ways to notify the community of changes. The blog is likely the easiest route for that.
I think WMF->community communication isn't a good way to handle things, unless it's simply announcements. Many of the complaints raised can be linked to poor communication. We need two way communication.
- Ryan