I think having a tool would be great. Whether we better use an existing
tool, or if we realize we need something that will make it easier than
bugzilla and mailing lists do.
This is one advantage Discourse has over mailing lists. If you had an idea
for the Firefox team you wouldn’t have to subscribe to the whole list to
share it. You could make your suggestion and subscribe only to that topic.
I think the rest of it is really addressing the unanswered question “how to
we make sure we’re allowing participation in product design, and who do we
allow to participate?” and that is tool agnostic. I agree that we should
give people a framework to submit a serious idea beyond tossing an idea out
in an email. It makes it easier for the idea to be understood and so makes
it easier for the relevant teams to properly consider the idea. Reps has
actually just adopted a process for this sort of thing, you can read about
it here - https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SOPs/Proposals