Dear Fedora marketing team,
One of our primary goals as a development community is to enhance and
streamline the end-user experience of Fedora. Right now, the Fedora Buzz
initiative aims to so this by monitoring various social networks and the
"blogosphere". While this may provide some valuable data, such collection
obviously could be made more focused; Buzz, by itself, only provides broad
opinions that might be difficult to translate into concrete development goals.
Systematic collection of voluntary usage data would enhance the ambassador and
marketing team pool of reference for making important decisions. It would
allow for us to discover areas of Fedora which users believe may warrant
improvement. By defining and understanding our market/base, we could target
those users with more ease. We would also know why they like Fedora, making it
easier to make marketing decisions. Currently, we are collecting hardware
information via Smolt, so this seems like the next logical step.
As this topic has been discussed before about data gathering/collection with
Smolt, we should consider about the user's privacy. We should not give him a
feeling of being invaded on his own system. This could be an issue if we want
to have data being collected from the system itself. The alternative would be
to have the user select and/or fill the information on a website. This would
provide the user with generally a better feeling of his privacy, but can cause
information to slip as the user couldn't not recollect he installed a certain
piece software. However, it does give a better overview if the user actually
uses a tool as he recollects having installed it and therefore having used it,
besides it just showing up in the installed packages list.
Examples of data we could collect:
-Statistics on software packages installed (which are not part of the default
installation), so as to streamline the inclusion of default apps to reflect
what users actually use.
-A user’s country of residence
-A user’s age
-Why a user has chosen Fedora over another operating system.
-...
I would like to keep this conversation focused on the type of information we
would like to request from our users. Afterwards, we could then bring the
conversation to the devel mailing list to receive their input and move forward
with this task.
Ultimately, we must remember and strive towards our goal of offering a better
user experience by understanding our target audience, as well as our existing
user base.
I look forward to your feedback,
Carl G.
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