The announcements tag is one possible way that employees can post updates, streams of consciousness, ad-hoc data that might be of interest or similar artifacts that aren't ideally suited for our blog audience. However, we've gotta implement an archetype to accommodate these posts (and make the tag, whatever it ends up being) reserved specifically for that use.
Searching based on who wrote it is problematic for a bunch of reasons pointed out by others, but it also excludes the many instances where we saw something that someone in the community wrote and just up-voted that instead. Not all questions about policy require a direct response from us, especially if it's in an area where we'd rather leave it to the autonomy of any given community.
What you're looking for from a practical standpoint is probably consensus, where you can find some kind of agreement on a given topic even if you have to take a lack of a reply from us on it as a tacit endorsement. Meta is quite frankly really bad at this, and that's something we're going to need to tackle. Discussions happen, stuff gets voted on, people go back to what they were doing thinking it's all settled and a year later, nobody can be quite sure anymore, especially someone new just trying to grok policy and the rules.
What we really need is some kinda process for referendum, which I plan to kick off a discussion about later this year. We might need to just support formal polls, and have some way of attaching them to questions (Trivia: they've existed in the database structure for eons, we just never built them).
I don't have a definite ETA other than this is something that blocks a more efficient, unobstructed flow of community governance into more official things like the help center, so it's important, as soon as we figure out how in the heck we can do it.
More pressing right now: Question lifecycle, quality, tooling on the main site. But this needs to be in place, too, in order to support that.
