I'm not fundamentally opposed, but I don't feel these necessarily are the solutions to real problems in the network right now.
Most of what you're suggesting already exists; meta is the product advisory council. The only difference is that you're not dealing with a subset of users, but an aggregation of the opinions of meta users, either directly through answers and comments, or indirectly through votes. This isn't optimal, but it's something. Over the years, it has yielded a backlog of critical improvements so long you could fill a series of books with it and still not get through the entire list.
As has been mentioned much worse by you (the company, to be clear) in the past, meta isn't all that representative of most users. Many users don't even interact with meta, nor know about its existence. For many, the featured tag (and HMP) is the only way they see content on meta. Any group you form is likely going to be based on the same group of meta regulars - election or not. Without onboarding, it doesn't really matter if you do or don't implement the PAC; it isn't going to increase the number of users interacting with meta, and by extension, who provide feedback.
Representativeness of users aside, the majority of the problem has always been that the community proposes a lot of alternatives, and nothing happens. In response to:
The Community Management (CM) team identified a key problem: Despite the best efforts of our Product Managers, community members often feel as though critical product needs go unrecognized or unevaluated; community members often feel as though their opinions on the direction of the Stack Exchange public Q&A product do not matter, are ignored, or are irrelevant.
That's because it isn't just a feeling. If you browse feature-request on meta.SE or meta.SO (as well as child metas, but to a lesser extent because volume differences), you will find plenty of highly upvoted and well-received ideas for improvements. You'll find similar issues with bugs and even feedback posts posted by the company
More importantly, and arguably the biggest problem, is when this happens on feedback posts. From our perspective, here's how many feature releases go (see, most recently, wizard 2.0 and the new editor; for mods, see also this mod team post for an upcoming severe tool breakage with a question that has been posed for over half a year):
- A Thing:tm: is announced, occasionally at the same time as
- The Thing:tm: is rolled out, optionally as an alpha or beta test
- Bugs are discovered
- ... only some of which are fixed, resulting in anything from non-critical to outright breaking and destructive bugs lingering for anywhere from a few months to, more commonly years or never being fixed.
- If the thing was rolled out as alpha or beta, it's then released to the general public in a broken state, with many of the reported bugs remaining; see again the editor and the wizard.
This is the kind of behaviour that causes the perception of being ignored. Additionally, this hit-and-run strategy with product deployment has caused an incomprehensibly large backlog of bugs, that then never seems to get enough developer time allocated to get fixed.
Then there are promises of betterment to some of our long-standing issues that never happen; outdated answers being one of the more recent and very, very important ones for the continued value of the Q&A in the future.
We have been collectively telling you stuff like this for years - topics like these have been discussed since before I joined the network. I understand that prioritising is hard, particularly when the backlog of highly important and critical problems continues to grow with every new hit-and-run release of some new feature, but having a dedicated group that's likely going to give a mostly identical list to the posts on meta isn't going to change the problem. Ultimately, this seems to stem from a lack of resources, as well as questionable priorities from upper management. See, for example, the decision to put significant staff resources into AI, and deprioritising absolutely everything else.
And even from a communication perspective, the goal of the PAC seems to just be shifting the organisational work of bugs and FRs to unpaid volunteers. Yes, the community gaining more influence is good, but you could also do this by listening to meta, and taking steps to improve onboarding (one of, if not the single most impactful area for change right now) to both main and especially meta to make meta more representative. I strongly doubt the PAC representatives are going to go around a digital space to gather opinions from people who don't participate in meta anyway, so right now, it doesn't gain anything over
- Actually listening to meta, and
- Putting resources into changing stuff requested by meta
a. ... particularly for large problems that have existed for years
The PAC would sort of, but not optimally, work towards #1. However, even without the PAC, the problem is #2. You can figure out a system where meta becomes a public prioritisation tool, but if you can't put your workforce where your commonly pointed-out problems are, regardless of who the source of the problem list consists of, nothing is going to change.
Therein lies my problem; are you actually going to put in long-term resources to make the changes we need? This isn't the first time we've been promised just one more thing that, pinkie promise, is going to start solving our problems, only for that promise to then be broken.
In fact, to quote Des (a staff member),
I'll take the bait, @YaakovEllis :) We are operating in a world of drastically reduced resources and that means hard prioritization decisions need to be made. The fact that this was undetermined for so long is a sign that there are people internally who are fighting to keep investing in it. By far the easiest thing to do (once it was shuttered) would have been to abandon it.
We have a lot of problems, and they need to be fixed, but that doesn't start with adding another layer of feedback; it starts with bringing developers back to public Q&A feature additions and bug fixes. From what I've heard, most or all of the public-facing projects have stalled and/or been quietly axed - including high-value and high-impact projects.
It doesn't really matter where you start at this point; start with one of the many, many highly upvoted bug reports or feature requests on meta, and you immediately build both some tentative confidence and trust that there is a path forward that doesn't result in yet another broken promise, and only short-term betterment.
The value of the PAC is going to increase as the list of long-standing issues decreases, and prioritising becomes more difficult than "pick one of the many, severe/breaking problems and just do something, anything that can even vaguely contribute towards a fix".
But we aren't there yet, especially given the apparent resource shortage.