PROPOSAL: Fedora user survey

[Chris Ball]

Hi,

   > Yes, anonymous polling is liking playing with fire. Let me throw
   > this out there -- for a *first* run -- you could only allow FAS
   > accounts to take the survey. That would really narrow your
   > demographics to only contributors, which is what you wish to see.

If we're trying to make decisions on behalf of people with FAS
accounts, that's what we have FESCo for.  We voted for them so that
they would represent us, and having them answer a policy question like
this one with "Well, let's create a huge vote about it" would feel
like a gigantic failure of governance.  We voted for them because we
expect them to look more deeply into what the right answer is on an
issue than a sampling of people with FAS accounts would; that's why
they're there.

Now, there's a reasonable argument that says that Fedora users without
FAS accounts didn't vote for FESCo, so it's still legitimate to ask
*those* users what they think.  The impossibility of reaching such a
group of users without incorporating selection bias would turn me off
from trying to do that -- it would be nice if we could find out how
the entire Fedora-using world feels about updates, but that's not
actually plausible.  Even just the set of Fedora users who visit
http://fedoraproject.org/ is significantly selection-biased already,
in my opinion.

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child