On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 09:42:28AM +0100, Richard Turner wrote:

On 10 May 2015 06:45, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" znmeb@znmeb.net wrote:

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I think they have the right idea. Instead of a survey, put a page like this at the download site for Workstation. I'd pay two bucks to download Fedora Workstation - compared to $160 for Windows 8.1 Pro it's a no-brainer. If people want media players, let them vote for them with money. If people want the KDE desktop or the Design spin or the audio spin or whatever - things they can easily install with the netinstall disk - let them vote for them with money.

I think that has an ugly subtext. Contrary to "we want and value your input" it's more "we'll endure your input if you pay us to". Hardly a good way to better engage with the wider community.

Not only that, but Fedora has no way to accept money for this, so it's highly unlikely to happen.

On 10 May 2015 11:06, "Diogo Campos (gmail)" diogocamposwd@gmail.com wrote:

• Age (to get a sense of the level of experience with computers and

similar).

Better just to ask for level of computer experience than try to infer it from age.

• Uses Fedora in everyday life.

• Uses which another OS in everyday life.

• What are the most important characteristics in an OS (to him/her).

• Occupation.

I don't know that this is relevant, unless it was meant as a header for the following two.

• Activities with computers at work.
• Softwares used in each of these work activities.

• Hobbies.

As occupation, I think this is irrelevant.

• Activities with computers at leisure.
• Softwares used in each of these leisure activities.

This is an opportunity to validate some of the assumptions we make about our users, so questions could stem from those assumptions. If level of computer experience is higher than average, is the subject comfortable on the CLI? Configuring iptables/Samba/etc? If it's low, how off-putting is using fedup?

1. it may sound blunt, but users often don't know what they want.

Henry Ford nailed it by this quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

In fact, my original idea is to ask to people what they are, what they do, what they use, what they know, and what they like(?), NOT (at least not exactly/directly) what they want.

But, BTW, a car IS a "faster horse". Isn't?

And I would be happier if populations worldwide promoted effective public transportation, instead of flooding streets with cars (and social isolation, and non-stopping capitalism, and [...]) - especially cars with 5 available seats and just 1 used.

2. the users who take part in this survey are not usually a

representative sample of the whole user base. For example my parents are long-time Fedora users, but they would never participate in such surveys, does it mean they should be thrown overboard?

I think I didn't make the idea all clear, so, of course, it's OK to see it this way. But, to be fair, my idea behind the "Official" word, is to heavily promote this survey (in the downloads page, Fedora Magazine, whatever) so people can, at least, collect a bit of useful information about a (small?) set of the (participative?) user base, knowing that "this" means "this" and represents exactly "this", and stopping making such guesswork in random places (Distrowatch? Reddit?) and random data (downloads statistics? results from independent blog surveys with non-caring people and "void" questions?).

I was thinking about it yesterday, and came to the conclusion that this idea is way more about a "database" than about a "survey".

It's important to listen to users, collect user feedback, work with it, but I think some formal surveys would shift it more to voting "Do you want A or B?" ... hey, A won, how come you goddamn didn't go for it? ... and that's not a way to go IMHO.

I understand that a "survey/database" may not be a useful thing. But your initial assumptions about this idea were a bit wrong. Do you mind writing your opinion again but now based on this little clarifications?

Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org said, on Monday, May 11, 2015 4:20 PM

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But, BTW, a car IS a "faster horse". Isn't?

One thing worth noting is that Ford had some pretty good feedback on whether he was right or not. People bought his cars, or they didn't — and either the company made a profit, or failed. We don't count anything that is equivalent to that in Fedora. I'm definitely open to ideas on how we could do that.

Couldn't a simple web counter of completed downloads be implemented, and showed for reference?

-- > Matthew Miller> mattdm@fedoraproject.org> Fedora Project Leader

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 4:20 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 03:29:41PM -0300, Diogo Campos (gmail) wrote:

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1. it may sound blunt, but users often don't know what they want.

Henry Ford nailed it by this quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

In fact, my original idea is to ask to people what they are, what they do, what they use, what they know, and what they like(?), NOT (at least not exactly/directly) what they want.

Yeah. Figuring out what to ask and how to ask it is important, as is getting the survey to the right groups.

In any case, I think we could definitely benefit from such a survey, and not just in the desktop space (although separate surveys or parts of the survey for cloud/server/workstation might make sense). Maybe take this discussion over to Marketing (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing) -- we actually talked about just this at the Council meeting today. For that matter, a user survey has been a long-time interest of the Fedora Board (now council) -- see https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/1 and https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/16.

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But, BTW, a car IS a "faster horse". Isn't?

One thing worth noting is that Ford had some pretty good feedback on whether he was right or not. People bought his cars, or they didn't -- and either the company made a profit, or failed. We don't count anything that is equivalent to that in Fedora. I'm definitely open to ideas on how we could do that.

Create an easy way for people to legally purchase codecs and content that is integrated through Workstation. Count money spent. In other words, create a _product_.

/me laughs at himself until he is blue in the face at the thought of all the red tape required to do that.

josh

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 5:13 PM, Bastien Nocera bnocera@redhat.com wrote:

----- Original Message -----

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Create an easy way for people to legally purchase codecs and content that is integrated through Workstation. Count money spent. In other words, create a _product_.

/me laughs at himself until he is blue in the face at the thought of all the red tape required to do that.

Not very much. But it won't respect Fedora's stance on only promoting Open Source software.

Eh. It depends on if you could get a patent license agreement that allows you to use FOSS codecs. That is a lot more red tape than closed binaries.

josh