the basic thing would be to inform the community of what bugs and features they know of and are working on – so the customers/community knows what can be expected to be fixed/implemented.

more community-friendly would be to enable a voting possibility on the published feature list. so the community can decide which feature will be implemented first or at all.

the most community-friendly would be to provide the possibility to write bug reports and feature requests to the public. but this would need a little bit of manpower for moderation to sort duplicates and poorly written entries.

public bug reports and feature requests work with a dedicated community. here is an example of a project, where this works nicely:
http://openxcom.org/bugs/openxcom
in the top menu “issues” one can find the menu items “open issues for this project” and “wishlist for this project”. everyone who registers can file entries. and feature requests can be voted upon by registered users. in this case bug reports are of very high quality and the community tries to give the devs as many leads as possible to find the bug.

for a participant it is really cool communication and interaction, when they report a bug and one day they its status changes from “open” to “fixed”, or even better file a feature request and one day its status changes from “open” to “implemented”.

+ Please add also “German forum” … Now English and German posts are mixed which is annoying.