What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

[Gregory Zysk]

Dear Marketing,

One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved. This is
true also for the those viewing the community from an external standpoint.
These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results are
measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have begun to
start an formulate research that will be used to produce these statistics,
but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these questionnaires
off of.

One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
Fedora Project?

As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics views
that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
2006. That is until June of 2009.

Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
sub-questions:

1) Who were these ambassadors?
2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?

Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding this
issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
better and more improved results, as we do technically with every release.


All the best,

Gregory

-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

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[Joerg Simon]

Hi Gregory, 

if a FOSS community starts to deal to much with itself it could be, that focus 
gets lost and is not healthy. 
I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully transport 
business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a FOSS 
Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not work 
here. But maybe we can adopt some of it! Please, this is not meant as a 
discouragement, it is a good idea to learn how things work in FOSS first - i 
know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try provide you an 
answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great by combine 
things from both world.


On Wednesday 14 October 2009 14:22:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
>  One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a
> marketing
>  mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
>  Fedora Project?
>
>  As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics views
>  that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
>  2006. That is until June of 2009. 
Just for notice - Fedora is far more than the Ambassadors Group which is only 
a (large) sub-project

>  Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
>  sub-questions:
>  1) Who were these ambassadors? 
In the past the Ambassador Group was often used by new Contributors as an 
entry level Group - which is what the Ambassador Group is definitely not - 
because you have not only to present Fedora as an OS - also the Project itself 
and therefore it is imperative to know the project better than anybody else. 
This is the reason why we have established a strong mentoring process and have 
a new membership process.

You can see the result, who they are where they are from ...
for the last month's here
https://fedorahosted.org/fama/report/6

>  2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of? 
this should be easy to get from FAS by writing a script -  is there a 
volunteer around ;) ?

>  3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group? 
You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean up 
of inactive accounts
http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html


Hope this helps to clarify a bit 

cu Joerg

-- 
Joerg (kital) Simon
jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
http://kitall.blogspot.com
Key Fingerprint:
3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688

[Joerg Simon]

replying to his own is also not healthy ;) but i want to add something

On Wednesday 14 October 2009 15:20:49 Joerg Simon wrote:
>  I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully
> transport
>  business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a FOSS
>  Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not work
>  here. But maybe we can adopt some of it!  
If you want measure success you need to quantify and measure that is for sure! 

>   i know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try
> provide
>   you an answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great by
>   combine things from both world. 
The right way to do things like that in fedora, would be a new "fedora 
statistics group" which could be a place for all people who like to gather 
data from fas, love to quantify and for people who want to interpret such 
things - the benefit, it keeps the "deal with us own" in this group. Away from 
the groups who want to be productive and do not wan't wasting time with such 
things (like writing scripts which will have no direct impact to the release 
itself)
How sounds that?

cu

-- 
Joerg (kital) Simon
jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
http://kitall.blogspot.com
Key Fingerprint:
3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688

[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Joerg Simon <jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;wrote:

>  Hi Gregory,
>
>  if a FOSS community starts to deal to much with itself it could be, that
>  focus
>  gets lost and is not healthy.
>  I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully transport
>  business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a FOSS
>  Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not work
>  here. But maybe we can adopt some of it! Please, this is not meant as a
>  discouragement, it is a good idea to learn how things work in FOSS first -
>  i
>  know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try provide you
>  an
>  answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great by combine
>  things from both world.
>  
> >>Joerg, I agree with you and do not want anyone to get the
> impression of 
that these measurement will be used for "control" purposes.
A combination
will be the best solution. Those people or companies which view the Fedora
project from the outside will not always have the "open source/FOSS mindet"
Especially those institutions within society which we are trying to "sell"
or concept to (such as companies, NPO's, NGO's) since they have to abide by
the legal contexts in which national and international law permits them to.
I believe in order to properly promote Fedora at events or the like, we must
be able to understand the "user" target group from a broader scale. This
means transformative tactics in communication have to be used. Fedora
Ambassadors and marketing members have to know how organizations and people
think outside the community in order to target them, thus providing us with
a broader target user base. Nonetheless, whether it is marketing in a
non-profit, social venture or for profit organization the same general
approaches/methods are used.

>  On Wednesday 14 October 2009 14:22:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
>  > One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
>  > mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within
>  the
>  > Fedora Project?
>  >
>  > As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetricsviews
>  > that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
>  > 2006. That is until June of 2009.
>
>  Just for notice - Fedora is far more than the Ambassadors Group which is
>  only
>  a (large) sub-project
>  
> >> Thanks, I understand this. 
>  > Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
>  > sub-questions:
>  > 1) Who were these ambassadors?
>
>  In the past the Ambassador Group was often used by new Contributors as an
>  entry level Group - which is what the Ambassador Group is definitely not -
>  because you have not only to present Fedora as an OS - also the Project
>  itself
>  and therefore it is imperative to know the project better than anybody
>  else.
>  This is the reason why we have established a strong mentoring process and
>  have
>  a new membership process.
>  
> >> Thanks, I understand this also. 
>  You can see the result, who they are where they are from ...
>  for the last month's here
>  https://fedorahosted.org/fama/report/6
>
>  > 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
>
>  this should be easy to get from FAS by writing a script -  is there a
>  volunteer around ;) ?
>
>  >>> That would be nice;) 

>  > 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>
>  You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean up
>  of inactive accounts
>  http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
>  
> >> There is the answer I was looking for. So, maybe we need to
> adjust the 
metrics to reflect this?


>  Hope this helps to clarify a bit
>
>  cu Joerg
>
>  --
>  Joerg (kital) Simon
>  jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
>  http://kitall.blogspot.com
>  Key Fingerprint:
>  3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

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[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Joerg Simon <jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;wrote:

>  replying to his own is also not healthy ;) but i want to add
> something
>
>  On Wednesday 14 October 2009 15:20:49 Joerg Simon wrote:
>  > I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully transport
>  > business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a
>  FOSS
>  > Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not
>  work
>  > here. But maybe we can adopt some of it!
>
>  If you want measure success you need to quantify and measure that is for
>  sure!
>  
> >> Measurement of success is great, but the definition of
> "success" is very 
broad. This is a form of output. In some social ventures
success can be
measured as social impact. From a technical side in Fedora, I believe this
measurement is easier and can be measured by the innovations applied to
every new release. From the non-technical aspect, it is a little more
difficult to measure "success" That is why this is a good discussion of how
we can measure this side of our "success".

>  >  i know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try provide
>  >  you an answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great
>  by
>  >  combine things from both world.
>
>  The right way to do things like that in fedora, would be a new "fedora
>  statistics group" which could be a place for all people who like to gather
>  data from fas, love to quantify and for people who want to interpret such
>  things - the benefit, it keeps the "deal with us own" in this group. Away
>  from
>  the groups who want to be productive and do not wan't wasting time with
>  such
>  things (like writing scripts which will have no direct impact to the
>  release
>  itself)
>  How sounds that?
>
>  >>> A fedora statistics group would be good, but it is only the start. We
need to know from the start what statistics/metrics/data we would like to
produce and for what reasons we are producing these measures.



>  cu
>
>  --
>  Joerg (kital) Simon
>  jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
>  http://kitall.blogspot.com
>  Key Fingerprint:
>  3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

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[Joerg Simon]

On Wednesday 14 October 2009 16:11:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
>  A fedora statistics group would be good, but it is only the start.
> We
>  need to know from the start what statistics/metrics/data we would like to
>  produce and for what reasons we are producing these measures. 
The first goal for this group ;)

cu Joerg
-- 
Joerg (kital) Simon
jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
http://kitall.blogspot.com
Key Fingerprint:
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[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Joerg Simon <jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;wrote:

>  On Wednesday 14 October 2009 16:11:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
>  > A fedora statistics group would be good, but it is only the start. We
>  > need to know from the start what statistics/metrics/data we would like to
>  > produce and for what reasons we are producing these measures.
>
>  The first goal for this group ;)
>  
> >> One of them, if not already defined, yes! 


>  cu Joerg
>  --
>  Joerg (kital) Simon
>  jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
>  http://kitall.blogspot.com
>  Key Fingerprint:
>  3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

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[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 15:48 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:

>  On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Joerg Simon 
>          
>          You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean
>          up
>          of inactive accounts
>          http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
>  
>  >>> There is the answer I was looking for. So, maybe we need to adjust
>  the metrics to reflect this? 
Why should we? I think this is an example of what Jörg tried to explain
when he said the a FOSS project doesn't need to behave like a company.

The ambassadors project is not listed on the stock exchange. The numbers
are honest, we should not manipulate them. We don't need to justify them
to our boss or our stakeholders. The are only needed for internal use
and all people in the project know that the process has changed in June.

Regards,
Christoph


P.S.:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#No_HTML_...

[Larry Cafiero]

Hey, all --

I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a little
help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote:

>  Dear Marketing,
>
>  One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
>  establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
>  internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved. This is
>  true also for the those viewing the community from an external standpoint.
>  These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
>  platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results are
>  measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
>  see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have begun
>  to start an formulate research that will be used to produce these
>  statistics, but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these
>  questionnaires off of.
>  
OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:

One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
>  mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009
> within the
>  Fedora Project?
>
>  As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics views
>  that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
>  2006. That is until June of 2009.
>
>  Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
>  sub-questions:
>
>  1) Who were these ambassadors?
>  2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
>  3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>  
Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June 2009
when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this program,
basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora Ambassador was
that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady breathing
(although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as you were
breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which a.) scares
off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free stuff," and
b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.

As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the Ambassadors
list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and those who
did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested) were
taken off.

That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false negative
when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.

I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but I
would bet that's why numbers dropped.

Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding this
>  issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us
> provide
>  better and more improved results, as we do technically with every release. 

Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11 and
what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look internally
at how many people participate in Fedora and why.

Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments, so
here are mine.

Larry Cafiero
Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
Fedora Project

[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Christoph Wickert <
christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 15:48 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:
>
>  > On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Joerg Simon
>  >
>  >         You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean
>  >         up
>  >         of inactive accounts
>  >         http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
>  >
>  > >>> There is the answer I was looking for. So, maybe we need to adjust
>  > the metrics to reflect this?
>
>  Why should we? I think this is an example of what Jörg tried to explain
>  when he said the a FOSS project doesn't need to behave like a company.
>
>  The ambassadors project is not listed on the stock exchange. The numbers
>  are honest, we should not manipulate them. We don't need to justify them
>  to our boss or our stakeholders. The are only needed for internal use
>  and all people in the project know that the process has changed in June.
>  
> > If we interact with people outside the community, then yes we do
> need to 
have some sort of metrics that reflect what we do. Those should, of course,
be honest, but also precise. Not just a round about figure. The reason being
legitimacy. This is one of the largest gauge for an organization which
produces knowledge as an output. In simple words, these figures can be used
for external purposes. And why not? The resources are already there (in this
case)


>  Regards,
>  Christoph
>
>
>  P.S.:
>
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#No_HTML_...
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

Fingerprint: 4643 E1AE 1AAD 85D4 6276
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[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Larry Cafiero <larry.cafiero(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote:

>  Hey, all --
>
>  I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a little
>  help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.
>
>  On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote:
>
> > Dear Marketing,
> >
> > One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
> > establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
> > internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved. This is
> > true also for the those viewing the community from an external standpoint.
> > These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
> > platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results are
> > measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
> > see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have begun
> > to start an formulate research that will be used to produce these
> > statistics, but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these
> > questionnaires off of.
> >
>
>  OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:
>
>  One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
> > mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
> > Fedora Project?
> >
> > As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetricsviews that we
> have had a steady increase since measurement began in January
> > of 2006. That is until June of 2009.
> >
> > Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
> > sub-questions:
> >
> > 1) Who were these ambassadors?
> > 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
> > 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
> >
>
>  Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June
>  2009 when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this
>  program, basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora
>  Ambassador was that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady
>  breathing (although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as
>  you were breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which
>  a.) scares off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free
>  stuff," and b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.
>
>  As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the
>  Ambassadors list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and
>  those who did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested)
>  were taken off.
>
>  That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false
>  negative when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.
>
>  I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but I
>  would bet that's why numbers dropped.
>  
> >> This could very well be it (A change in the mentorship
> program). I am 
just trying to get some answers that will give me some feedback to
formulate
ideas from.

>  Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding this
> > issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
> > better and more improved results, as we do technically with every release.
>
>
>  Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
>  group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
>  developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11 and
>  what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
>  scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look internally
>  at how many people participate in Fedora and why.
>  
> >> Your internal situation always reflects your external
> situation. For 
instance, if you are sad or not feeling good on the inside, other
people
will see that and then respond to you accordingly. I agree that these
external experiences also need to be measured. There is a problem with
measuring downloads though, it does not give us a realistic number of how
many people actually use Fedora. It goes for the same ranking system on
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity. These popularity
rankings are just based off of downloads and just give us data to reflect
just that: downloads.

>  Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments,
>  so here are mine.
>  
> >> Of course. I will always welcome your comments any all others
> too. Thank 
you for them :)

>  Larry Cafiero
>  Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
>  Fedora Project
>
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


-- 
Gregory Zysk

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk

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[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 17:26 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:


>  >> If we interact with people outside the community, then yes
> we do
>  need to have some sort of metrics that reflect what we do.  
I don't think that the number of ambassadors reflects what we do. There
are other ways to measure this: The number of events we do, the number
of talks our ambassadors do or the number of Fedora installs [1] and so
on.

Take a look at Ubuntu, they seem measure their success by the number of
Ubuntu CDs the gave away on an event. I recall talking to a guy from
their community and he said: "It was a very successful event for Ubuntu,
we gave away nearly 3000 CDs." I wasn't really surprised about the high
number because they had big boxes of CDs standing in front of their
booth. People walked by and grabbed 10 or 20 at once while the Ubuntu
people were sitting behind their desk and reading books.
To me this is no success. For me it is more important to have a nice
conversation with somebody. We talk for 5 or 10 minutes and then I give
him a Live-CD before he leaves. I'm sure this person is much more
interested in Fedora and has learned more about the project than
somebody who papers his restroom with Ubuntu-CDs because they bling so
nice. ;)

We must not take numbers as the key to everything. Numbers do not
reflect how well a community is working or how people actually feel as
being part of this community. Is there a way to measure pride or
gratitude?

>  Those should, of course, be honest, but also precise. Not just a
> round
>  about figure. The reason being legitimacy. 
I think they are precise. The number of Ambassadors has decreased, but
their quality has increased. How would you measure quality by numbers?

>  This is one of the largest gauge for an organization which produces
>  knowledge as an output. In simple words, these figures can be used for
>  external purposes. And why not? The resources are already there (in
>  this case) 
What kind of external purposes do you think of?

Regards,
Christoph

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics

>          P.S.:
>         
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#No_HTML_...

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Larry Cafiero <larry.cafiero(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  wrote:
> >
> > Hey, all --
> >
> > I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a little
> > help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project(a)gmail.com&gt;
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Dear Marketing,
> >>
> >> One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
> >> establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
> >> internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved. This is
> >> true also for the those viewing the community from an external standpoint.
> >> These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
> >> platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results are
> >> measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
> >> see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have begun to
> >> start an formulate research that will be used to produce these statistics,
> >> but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these questionnaires
> >> off of.
> >
> > OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:
> >
> >> One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
> >> mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
> >> Fedora Project?
> >>
> >> As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics
> >> views that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January
> >> of 2006. That is until June of 2009.
> >>
> >> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
> >> sub-questions:
> >>
> >> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
> >> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
> >> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
> >
> > Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June
> > 2009 when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this
> > program, basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora
> > Ambassador was that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady
> > breathing (although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as
> > you were breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which
> > a.) scares off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free
> > stuff," and b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.
> >
> > As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the
> > Ambassadors list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and
> > those who did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested)
> > were taken off.
> >
> > That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false
> > negative when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.
> >
> > I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but
> > I would bet that's why numbers dropped.
>
> >>> This could very well be it (A change in the mentorship program). I am
> >>> just trying to get some answers that will give me some feedback to formulate
> >>> ideas from.
> >
> >> Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding this
> >> issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
> >> better and more improved results, as we do technically with every release.
> >
> > Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
> > group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
> > developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11 and
> > what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
> > scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look internally
> > at how many people participate in Fedora and why.
>
> >>> Your internal situation always reflects your external situation. For
> >>> instance, if you are sad or not feeling good on the inside, other people
> >>> will see that and then respond to you accordingly. I agree that these
> >>> external experiences also need to be measured. There is a problem with
> >>> measuring downloads though, it does not give us a realistic number of how
> >>> many people actually use Fedora. It goes for the same ranking system
> >>> on http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity. These popularity
> >>> rankings are just based off of downloads and just give us data to reflect
> >>> just that: downloads. 
This is a perpetual problem, not just for Fedora but for Linux in
general.  For the most part, Linux doesn't have the luxury of selling
licenses and thus the ability to produce a magic number of exactly how
many machines, or how many users, there actually are.  There is
actually, or at least was in the past, a project to try and tackle
this (and my brain is suffering from a lack of caffeine at the moment,
so I unfortunately can't remember what they are called offhand) -- but
the concept of asking users to have an automatic registration of their
server / pc with any sort of tracking authority just doesn't jive well
with the freedom lovers out there, myself included.  (Not to mention
it just invites the opportunity for people to automate a way to
register their PC 600 times a day, skewing the numbers.)

Now, some market research companies do take a stab at this (see
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications/Linux_in_New...
.... page 3) - but from my understanding the non-paid part is a
formula of downloads to actual usage ratios, with some other magic
thrown, a little bit of backrubbing, and who knows what else.

All that said: yes, I would agree that knowing how many people are
actually using Fedora, vs. just downloading it, would be a fun
statistic to have.  But I'm not sure where that gets us.  Certainly,
it defines a market for us, assuming we could figure out our
percentage of share vs. other distributions, and gives us a goal to
strive for; it does not, however, define how we get from where we are
to where we want to be. And as Larry pointed out, asking our end-users
questions about their experiences (are you happy with X, Y, Z, on a
scale of 1 - 5, etc) is a Good Thing.  It allows us to (a) know our
strengths, which we should capitalize on, and continue to focus in
those areas and make sure that hard work continues to pay off, and (b)
know our weaknesses, so we can fill in those gaps.  Even if we can't
define just how big our user base is, or compare it size-wise with
other distributions, we can at least focus on making things greater;
if we know who are users are, we can cater to them better, and if we
know who are users are not, we can make decisions about whether or not
we want to go after them, what it would take.


$.02,

robyn
> >
> > Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments,
> > so here are mine.
>
> >>> Of course. I will always welcome your comments any all others too. Thank
> >>> you for them :)
> >
> > Larry Cafiero
> > Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
> > Fedora Project
> >
> >
> > --
> > Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> > Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>
>
>
>  --
>  Gregory Zysk
>
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk
>
>  Fingerprint: 4643 E1AE 1AAD 85D4 6276
>                   7C42 3591 A189 B8BF 04D6
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>

[Tareq Al Jurf]

2009/10/14 Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt;

>  Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 17:26 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:
>
>
>  > >> If we interact with people outside the community, then yes we do
>  > need to have some sort of metrics that reflect what we do.
>
>  I don't think that the number of ambassadors reflects what we do. There
>  are other ways to measure this: The number of events we do, the number
>  of talks our ambassadors do or the number of Fedora installs [1] and so
>  on.
>
>  Take a look at Ubuntu, they seem measure their success by the number of
>  Ubuntu CDs the gave away on an event. I recall talking to a guy from
>  their community and he said: "It was a very successful event for Ubuntu,
>  we gave away nearly 3000 CDs." I wasn't really surprised about the high
>  number because they had big boxes of CDs standing in front of their
>  booth. People walked by and grabbed 10 or 20 at once while the Ubuntu
>  people were sitting behind their desk and reading books.
>  To me this is no success. For me it is more important to have a nice
>  conversation with somebody. We talk for 5 or 10 minutes and then I give
>  him a Live-CD before he leaves. I'm sure this person is much more
>  interested in Fedora and has learned more about the project than
>  somebody who papers his restroom with Ubuntu-CDs because they bling so
>  nice. ;)
>
>  We must not take numbers as the key to everything. Numbers do not
>  reflect how well a community is working or how people actually feel as
>  being part of this community. Is there a way to measure pride or
>  gratitude?
>
>  > Those should, of course, be honest, but also precise. Not just a round
>  > about figure. The reason being legitimacy.
>
>  I think they are precise. The number of Ambassadors has decreased, but
>  their quality has increased. How would you measure quality by numbers?
>
>  
Exactly
I've noticed that the ambassadors available now have full profiles and are
very active
Before that i used to find ambassadors that have only a couple of words on
their profiles.
But know whenever Joerg Simon sends a welcome message, i like to see their
profiles
a lot better and productive than before.


>  > This is one of the largest gauge for an organization which
> produces
>  > knowledge as an output. In simple words, these figures can be used for
>  > external purposes. And why not? The resources are already there (in
>  > this case)
>
>  What kind of external purposes do you think of?
>
>  Regards,
>  Christoph
>
>  [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
>
>  >         P.S.:
>  >
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#No_HTML_...
>
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


-- 
Tareq Al Jurf
Fedora Ambassador
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
taljurf(a)fedoraproject.org

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 17:35 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:

>  There is a problem with measuring downloads though, it does not give
>  us a realistic number of how many people actually use Fedora.  
We do have smolt data for that:
http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/static/stats/stats.html

>  It goes for the same ranking system on
>  http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity. These popularity
>  rankings are just based off of downloads and just give us data to
>  reflect just that: downloads. 
And you think distrowatch is more representative? I don't think so.

Distrowatch is counting visitors by user agent strings. Ask yourself:
Who visits distrowatch? Likely somebody who is looking for a new distro
to try. So are these people really happy with their distro or even
convinced of it? This is something the numbers cannot show.

By counting uniqe visits, you wont get numbers of OS installations or
users, because you don't know how often people visit that site. There
are people who say the number of Fedora installs is actually larger than
the number of Ubuntu installations, but quite a lot of them are servers
running in data centers [1]. They will never show up at distrowatch
because servers usually don't visit that site. ;)

Regards,
Christoph

[1] Just look at the high number of virtual machines in smolt.

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Larry Cafiero <larry.cafiero(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hey, all --
>
>  I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a little
>  help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.
>
>  On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  wrote:
> >
> > Dear Marketing,
> >
> > One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
> > establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
> > internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved. This is
> > true also for the those viewing the community from an external standpoint.
> > These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
> > platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results are
> > measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
> > see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have begun to
> > start an formulate research that will be used to produce these statistics,
> > but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these questionnaires
> > off of.
>  
I'll have a more extensive response later this morning (like after I
replace my headlight on my car, ugh!) - but I just wanted to interject
here before we go running off on a tangent:

As the person heading up the market research "stuff," I would be
delighted to have more input / help in the process. I'm not quite sure
what you mean by methodologies, or if you mean something more like
goals, long-term strategy, etc.; at this point, given the lack of any
sort of user research being done in the past several years, the first
swag at doing surveys is to get a general baseline of who are users
ARE, so that we know who they are not, for the purposes of generally
catering to Fedora customers better.  Or to put it in marketing-speak:
determine who our market is, where our market could be, with the end
goal of figuring out how we get from point A to point B. The fact is,
we can speculate a lot about who Fedora users are, what types of user
groups they fit into (IT people? college students? predominantly
people not in the US?) - but without asking who they are, and getting
a general feel for that, and what their general satisfaction levels
are, we really can't start to ask more pointed questions.  In fact, it
becomes difficult to even set goals, or define strategies; we
certainly don't want to put ourselves in the position of setting goals
that are either impossible to obtain, or essentially already achieved.

And WRT goals / strategies, there has been a thread ongoing on the
fedora board mailing list discussing this very subject; Mel sent out a
mail last Friday referencing this.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-October/msg000...

As an FYI, there is more coming on the market research front, which
I'll be sending out hopefully today; I've been saddled with being
sick, school stuff, and a lost cat :( so things haven't been moving
the way I'd like them to.  However, this discussion has been filled
with lots of goodness that I'll be taking into consideration, and of
course I'd like feedback when I send things out for people to review.

>  OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:
>
> > One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
> > mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
> > Fedora Project?
> >
> > As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics views
> > that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
> > 2006. That is until June of 2009.
> >
> > Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
> > sub-questions:
> >
> > 1) Who were these ambassadors?
> > 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
> > 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>
>  Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June 2009
>  when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this program,
>  basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora Ambassador was
>  that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady breathing
>  (although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as you were
>  breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which a.) scares
>  off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free stuff," and
>  b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.
>
>  As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the Ambassadors
>  list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and those who
>  did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested) were
>  taken off.
>
>  That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false negative
>  when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.
>
>  I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but I
>  would bet that's why numbers dropped.
>
> > Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding this
> > issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
> > better and more improved results, as we do technically with every release.
>
>  Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
>  group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
>  developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11 and
>  what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
>  scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look internally
>  at how many people participate in Fedora and why. 
This is precisely the kind of information I'd like to be getting from
doing user surveys in the future.  Figure out what we are doing right,
and do more of it; figure out what is going wrong, and fix it.

As for internal surveying, I think it would be useful to occasionally
gauge community members on their satisfaction levels, etc., but I
think this unfortunately becomes an exercise in scratching our own
backs; if they're here, they're probably happy, if they're not, they
certainly have the freedom to voice their opinions and
dissatisfactions (and likely are doing so), and if they are leaving,
there is probably a very low percentage that they will come back.  The
dissatisfaction level, I would suspect, would probably be low enough
to not warrant any huge changes to "the system"; it would be more
something that would need to be tackled on a one-on-one basis, which
is not something you want to do when you're surveying people (ie: I'm
going to get your name, and then I'm going to contact you directly -
this tends to turn survey participants off quite a bit).  Individual
group leaders could take on the task of figuring out why their people
are leaving, particularly if it seems to be systemic, but this may be
a lot to ask, but could certainly be valuable in preventing the issues
that caused community members to leave in the first place.

As for general statistics - I think it is certainly interesting, and
definitely something that could be automated/scripted, but we need to
be careful to not bombard users with endless requests for how they are
feeling.  Once a quarter, twice a year, focused on specific topics is
the way to go, IMO.  Looking at things like downloads, what countries
they are coming from, what architectures people are using can
certainly be valuable (if we have a crapton of downloads originating
in the Bahamas, and no ambassador there, then we might want to start
having the "who wants to move to the islands!!! contest) to ensure
that we are focusing resources in the right places.

>  Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments, so
>  here are mine.
>
>  Larry Cafiero
>  Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
>  Fedora Project
>
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 19:15 +0300 schrieb Tareq Al Jurf:
>  
>  
>  2009/10/14 Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt;
>          
>          
>          The number of Ambassadors has decreased, but
>          their quality has increased. How would you measure quality by
>          numbers?
>
>  
>  Exactly
>  I've noticed that the ambassadors available now have full profiles and
>  are very active
>  Before that i used to find ambassadors that have only a couple of
>  words on their profiles.
>  But now whenever Joerg Simon sends a welcome message, i like to see
>  their profiles a lot better and productive than before. 
You see, this is something we actually *can* measure and we see that the
new mentoring program bears fruit. Glad to hear that, so I don't really
care about a few inactive ambassadors being removed and some numbers
going down for a month.

Regards,
Christoph

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Joerg Simon <jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  Hi Gregory,
>
>  if a FOSS community starts to deal to much with itself it could be, that focus
>  gets lost and is not healthy.
>  I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully transport
>  business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a FOSS
>  Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not work
>  here. But maybe we can adopt some of it! Please, this is not meant as a
>  discouragement, it is a good idea to learn how things work in FOSS first - i
>  know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try provide you an
>  answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great by combine
>  things from both world. 
I would agree that there is definitely not a 1:1 from FOSS to the
business world. I used to work for a Very Big Processor company, where
most things came out of a marketing plan, and I would be willing to be
a very large sum of money (or at least, a coffee for someone!) that if
employees came to work and started doing something that was not on the
plan, upper management would have had numerous seizures.  And god
forbid if people who didn't even work there started showing up and
doing things.  I'd also bet (now i'm up to two coffees!) that if Linus
had had a marketing team defining a list of project requirements, we
would all be typing our emails on a different type of machine right
now.

That is not to say that Marketing, specifically the strategic
marketing end of things, doesn't have a role in Fedora or Linux.  FOSS
simply has a different way of going about things; users see gaps, or
room for improvements, and they come and fix it, and become
participants in the overall community.  Many of these community
members are doing this on their own time, not as part of their jobs;
if they wanted someone to dictate to them what they should be working
on, they would probably just go and work longer hours at their jobs.

Strategic marketing, in my opinion, should be a guiding light for the
engineers.  Imagine if a group of people got together and decided to
build a road, so they just do it (I'll just ignore the part about how
the government is totally going to come and slap them around for not
having permits and whatnot).  These road engineers, who are busting
their butts doing an awesome job for the greater good, don't want
people nitpicking them to death on what they aren't doing; they might,
however, appreciate information like, "Oh hey, you guys are aware that
6 miles up the road you haven't built yet is a huge chasm - you might
want to start thinking about how to build a bridge!" or "Hey guys...we
just talked to the people in the city, and it looks like you might
need an additional lane for all the traffic you're going to be
getting."  And when the road is done, it never hurts to let them know
that - hey! - 95% of the community thinks that your road is freakin
awesome.

Basically, doing end-user research accomplishes a few things - it lets
engineering know what is going right, and what is not going so right,
and maybe what can be done to fix it.  There are also tons of untapped
potential community members out there; if we present them with a list
of ways to participate, rather than expecting them to find a niche on
their own, we can get more participants.

I'm pretty sure that was fairly incoherent.  I'll be going to find
some caffeine now. :)

-robyn

>  On Wednesday 14 October 2009 14:22:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
> > One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
> > mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
> > Fedora Project?
> >
> > As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics views
> > that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
> > 2006. That is until June of 2009.
>
>  Just for notice - Fedora is far more than the Ambassadors Group which is only
>  a (large) sub-project
>
> > Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
> > sub-questions:
> > 1) Who were these ambassadors?
>
>  In the past the Ambassador Group was often used by new Contributors as an
>  entry level Group - which is what the Ambassador Group is definitely not -
>  because you have not only to present Fedora as an OS - also the Project itself
>  and therefore it is imperative to know the project better than anybody else.
>  This is the reason why we have established a strong mentoring process and have
>  a new membership process.
>
>  You can see the result, who they are where they are from ...
>  for the last month's here
>  https://fedorahosted.org/fama/report/6
>
> > 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
>
>  this should be easy to get from FAS by writing a script -  is there a
>  volunteer around ;) ?
>
> > 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>
>  You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean up
>  of inactive accounts
>  http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
>
>
>  Hope this helps to clarify a bit
>
>  cu Joerg
>
>  --
>  Joerg (kital) Simon
>  jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
>  http://kitall.blogspot.com
>  Key Fingerprint:
>  3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688
>
>  --
>  Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
>  Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>

[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Christoph Wickert <
christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 17:26 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:
>
>
>  > >> If we interact with people outside the community, then yes we do
>  > need to have some sort of metrics that reflect what we do.
>
>  I don't think that the number of ambassadors reflects what we do. There
>  are other ways to measure this: The number of events we do, the number
>  of talks our ambassadors do or the number of Fedora installs [1] and so
>  
> >>Agreed. But it gives us a start and focus as a platform to
> build from. 
>  on.
>
>  Take a look at Ubuntu, they seem measure their success by the number of
>  Ubuntu CDs the gave away on an event. I recall talking to a guy from
>  their community and he said: "It was a very successful event for Ubuntu,
>  we gave away nearly 3000 CDs." I wasn't really surprised about the high
>  number because they had big boxes of CDs standing in front of their
>  booth. People walked by and grabbed 10 or 20 at once while the Ubuntu
>  people were sitting behind their desk and reading books.
>  To me this is no success. For me it is more important to have a nice
>  conversation with somebody. We talk for 5 or 10 minutes and then I give
>  him a Live-CD before he leaves. I'm sure this person is much more
>  interested in Fedora and has learned more about the project than
>  somebody who papers his restroom with Ubuntu-CDs because they bling so
>  nice. ;)
>
>  >>> Agreed also. That is a waste of time and financial resources which
could be better used elsewhere.

We must not take numbers as the key to everything. Numbers do not
>  reflect how well a community is working or how people actually feel
> as
>  being part of this community. Is there a way to measure pride or
>  gratitude?
>  
> >>Again. Agreed. Numbers are not everything to you, but they are
> the basis 
when trying to get sponsorship/support from other organizations
(government,
NGO, For-profit, etc)

>  > Those should, of course, be honest, but also precise. Not just a round
>  > about figure. The reason being legitimacy.
>
>  I think they are precise. The number of Ambassadors has decreased, but
>  their quality has increased. How would you measure quality by numbers?
>  
> >>Difficult. We need to build a methodology and sampling to
> support that. 
>  > This is one of the largest gauge for an organization which produces
>  > knowledge as an output. In simple words, these figures can be used for
>  > external purposes. And why not? The resources are already there (in
>  > this case)
>
>  What kind of external purposes do you think of?
>
>  Regards,
>  Christoph
>  
> >>Events are good, papers at events could be one, contributions,
> initiated 
projects, sponsorships, trainings......There are many different possible
variables that can be measured. We just have to define some and build off of
that.

>  [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
>
>  >         P.S.:
>  >
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines#No_HTML_...
>
>
>  --
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>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


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[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Christoph Wickert <
christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 17:35 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:
>
>  > There is a problem with measuring downloads though, it does not give
>  > us a realistic number of how many people actually use Fedora.
>
>  We do have smolt data for that:
>  http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/static/stats/stats.html
>
>  > It goes for the same ranking system on
>  > http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity. These popularity
>  > rankings are just based off of downloads and just give us data to
>  > reflect just that: downloads.
>
>  And you think distrowatch is more representative? I don't think so.
>  
> >> It is representative for downloads, or at least some of them.
>  Distrowatch is counting visitors by user agent strings. Ask yourself:
>  Who visits distrowatch? 

> >>I did!! That is how I cam to using Fedora. That is how
> everyone I know 
has referred me to and the same way they came to using FOSS.


>  Likely somebody who is looking for a new distro
>  to try. So are these people really happy with their distro or even
>  convinced of it? 

> >>This is accomplished by separate surveys or sampling
> techniques. 

>  This is something the numbers cannot show.
>  
> >>Once a methodology and research design is set in place. These
> numbers 
will show exactly what you have created them to be.

>  By counting uniqe visits, you wont get numbers of OS installations or
>  users, because you don't know how often people visit that site. There
>  are people who say the number of Fedora installs is actually larger than
>  the number of Ubuntu installations, but quite a lot of them are servers
>  running in data centers [1]. They will never show up at distrowatch
>  because servers usually don't visit that site. ;)
>  
> >>This from an objective point of view is just opinion. You ask
> an Ubuntu 
user and they will say they have the most. You ask a person who works for
microsoft who has the best OS? Don't be surprised if they say: microsoft.

>  Regards,
>  Christoph
>
>  [1] Just look at the high number of virtual machines in smolt.
>
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>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  


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[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Robyn Bergeron <robyn.bergeron(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote:

>  On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Larry Cafiero
> <larry.cafiero(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  wrote:
>  > Hey, all --
>  >
>  > I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a
>  little
>  > help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.
>  >
>  > On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  > wrote:
>  >>
>  >> Dear Marketing,
>  >>
>  >> One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
>  >> establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
>  >> internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved.
>  This is
>  >> true also for the those viewing the community from an external
>  standpoint.
>  >> These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
>  >> platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results
>  are
>  >> measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
>  >> see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have
>  begun to
>  >> start an formulate research that will be used to produce these
>  statistics,
>  >> but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these
>  questionnaires
>  >> off of.
>  >
>
>  I'll have a more extensive response later this morning (like after I
>  replace my headlight on my car, ugh!) - but I just wanted to interject
>  here before we go running off on a tangent:
>
>  As the person heading up the market research "stuff," I would be
>  delighted to have more input / help in the process. I'm not quite sure
>  what you mean by methodologies 

> >>Methodology -How you will attack to apply your research. It
> usually 
consists of which secondary/primary data you are basing your research
design
off of.
The next is Research design: Will this consist of exploratory
(interviews/focus groups) or descriptive research (survey methods and
errors)?  If per say you use a descriptive research design: Which sampling
will you use? The things I have seen proposed before (I.E. Do you like
Fedora? 1-5 Very Much, Much, Average, Not much, not at all) this is called
likert scaling. This is market research and market research is a science. It
does not show difference to a profit-industry or FOSS. It is not industry
specific.

, or if you mean something more like
>  goals, long-term strategy, etc.; 

> >>This is what is formed from the Market research process:)

>  at this point, given the lack of any
>  sort of user research being done in the past several years, the first
>  swag at doing surveys is to get a general baseline of who are users
>  ARE, so that we know who they are not, for the purposes of generally
>  catering to Fedora customers better 

> >>This data can be used for a pilot for the greater market
> research process 
as a whole.


>  .  Or to put it in marketing-speak:
>  determine who our market is, where our market could be, with the end
>  goal of figuring out how we get from point A to point B. 

> >>That is generally the point. 

>  The fact is,
>  we can speculate a lot about who Fedora users are, what types of user
>  groups they fit into (IT people? college students? predominantly
>  people not in the US?) - but without asking who they are, and getting
>  a general feel for that, and what their general satisfaction levels
>  are, we really can't start to ask more pointed questions.  In fact, it
>  becomes difficult to even set goals, or define strategies; we
>  certainly don't want to put ourselves in the position of setting goals
>  that are either impossible to obtain, or essentially already achieved.
>
>  And WRT goals / strategies, there has been a thread ongoing on the
>  fedora board mailing list discussing this very subject; Mel sent out a
>  mail last Friday referencing this.
>
>  https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-October/msg000...
>
>  As an FYI, there is more coming on the market research front, which
>  I'll be sending out hopefully today; I've been saddled with being
>  sick, school stuff, and a lost cat :( so things haven't been moving
>  the way I'd like them to.  However, this discussion has been filled
>  with lots of goodness that I'll be taking into consideration, and of
>  course I'd like feedback when I send things out for people to review.
>  
> >> Sorry to hear that :( 
>  > OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:
>  >
>  >> One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
>  >> mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within
>  the
>  >> Fedora Project?
>  >>
>  >> As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetricsviews
>  >> that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
>  >> 2006. That is until June of 2009.
>  >>
>  >> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
>  >> sub-questions:
>  >>
>  >> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
>  >> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
>  >> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>  >
>  > Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June
>  2009
>  > when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this
>  program,
>  > basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora Ambassador was
>  > that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady breathing
>  > (although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as you
>  were
>  > breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which a.)
>  scares
>  > off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free stuff," and
>  > b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.
>  >
>  > As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the
>  Ambassadors
>  > list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and those who
>  > did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested) were
>  > taken off.
>  >
>  > That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false
>  negative
>  > when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.
>  >
>  > I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but
>  I
>  > would bet that's why numbers dropped.
>  >
>  >> Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding
>  this
>  >> issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
>  >> better and more improved results, as we do technically with every
>  release.
>  >
>  > Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
>  > group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
>  > developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11
>  and
>  > what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
>  > scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look
>  internally
>  > at how many people participate in Fedora and why.
>
>  This is precisely the kind of information I'd like to be getting from
>  doing user surveys in the future.  Figure out what we are doing right,
>  and do more of it; figure out what is going wrong, and fix it.
>
>  As for internal surveying, I think it would be useful to occasionally
>  gauge community members on their satisfaction levels, etc., but I
>  think this unfortunately becomes an exercise in scratching our own
>  backs; if they're here, they're probably happy, if they're not, they
>  certainly have the freedom to voice their opinions and
>  dissatisfactions (and likely are doing so), and if they are leaving,
>  there is probably a very low percentage that they will come back.  The
>  dissatisfaction level, I would suspect, would probably be low enough
>  to not warrant any huge changes to "the system"; it would be more
>  something that would need to be tackled on a one-on-one basis, which
>  is not something you want to do when you're surveying people (ie: I'm
>  going to get your name, and then I'm going to contact you directly -
>  this tends to turn survey participants off quite a bit).  Individual
>  group leaders could take on the task of figuring out why their people
>  are leaving, particularly if it seems to be systemic, but this may be
>  a lot to ask, but could certainly be valuable in preventing the issues
>  that caused community members to leave in the first place.
>
>  As for general statistics - I think it is certainly interesting, and
>  definitely something that could be automated/scripted, but we need to
>  be careful to not bombard users with endless requests for how they are
>  feeling.  Once a quarter, twice a year, focused on specific topics is
>  the way to go, IMO.  Looking at things like downloads, what countries
>  they are coming from, what architectures people are using can
>  certainly be valuable (if we have a crapton of downloads originating
>  in the Bahamas, and no ambassador there, then we might want to start
>  having the "who wants to move to the islands!!! contest) to ensure
>  that we are focusing resources in the right places.
>
>  >
>  > Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments,
>  so
>  > here are mine.
>  >
>  > Larry Cafiero
>  > Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
>  > Fedora Project
>  >
>  >
>  > --
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>  > Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com
>  > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>  >
>
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[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Christoph Wickert <
christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 19:15 +0300 schrieb Tareq Al Jurf:
>  >
>  >
>  > 2009/10/14 Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com&gt;
>  >
>  >
>  >         The number of Ambassadors has decreased, but
>  >         their quality has increased. How would you measure quality by
>  >         numbers?
>  >
>  >
>  > Exactly
>  > I've noticed that the ambassadors available now have full profiles and
>  > are very active
>  > Before that i used to find ambassadors that have only a couple of
>  > words on their profiles.
>  > But now whenever Joerg Simon sends a welcome message, i like to see
>  > their profiles a lot better and productive than before.
>
>  You see, this is something we actually *can* measure and we see that the
>  new mentoring program bears fruit. Glad to hear that, so I don't really
>  care about a few inactive ambassadors being removed and some numbers
>  going down for a month.
>  
> >>Yes this is good. But the mentoring program and/or ambassador
> program is 
just an example of the data which has been provided. We can do this for
other parts of the project and for a collective way of measurement for other
things :)

>  Regards,
>  Christoph
>
>  
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[Gregory Zysk]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Robyn Bergeron <robyn.bergeron(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote:

>  On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Joerg Simon
> <jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
>  wrote:
>  > Hi Gregory,
>  >
>  > if a FOSS community starts to deal to much with itself it could be, that
>  focus
>  > gets lost and is not healthy.
>  > I think there is a risk to fail if one is trying to succesfully transport
>  > business measurement techniques one to one from business world into a
>  FOSS
>  > Project. Measurement is about control and business controlls will not
>  work
>  > here. But maybe we can adopt some of it! Please, this is not meant as a
>  > discouragement, it is a good idea to learn how things work in FOSS first
>  - i
>  > know you are very eager to start and that is the reason i try provide you
>  an
>  > answer for your questions - maybe we can achieve something great by
>  combine
>  > things from both world.
>
>  I would agree that there is definitely not a 1:1 from FOSS to the
>  business world. I used to work for a Very Big Processor company, where
>  most things came out of a marketing plan, and I would be willing to be
>  a very large sum of money (or at least, a coffee for someone!) that if
>  employees came to work and started doing something that was not on the
>  plan, upper management would have had numerous seizures.  And god
>  forbid if people who didn't even work there started showing up and
>  doing things.  I'd also bet (now i'm up to two coffees!) that if Linus
>  had had a marketing team defining a list of project requirements, we
>  would all be typing our emails on a different type of machine right
>  now.
>  
> >>There have been several articles on places such as CNET and
> the like 
which highlight the deficit of linux/open source looking at the marketing
perspective. I believe that marketing is key to strategy and development in
any organization, anywhere is the world.

>  That is not to say that Marketing, specifically the strategic
>  marketing end of things, doesn't have a role in Fedora or Linux.  FOSS
>  simply has a different way of going about things; users see gaps, or
>  room for improvements, and they come and fix it, and become
>  participants in the overall community.  Many of these community
>  members are doing this on their own time 

> >> I know, I am one of them. 

>  , not as part of their jobs;
>  if they wanted someone to dictate to them what they should be working
>  on, they would probably just go and work longer hours at their jobs.
>
>  Strategic marketing, in my opinion, should be a guiding light for the
>  engineers.  Imagine if a group of people got together and decided to
>  build a road, so they just do it (I'll just ignore the part about how
>  the government is totally going to come and slap them around for not
>  having permits and whatnot).  These road engineers, who are busting
>  their butts doing an awesome job for the greater good, don't want
>  people nitpicking them to death on what they aren't doing; they might,
>  however, appreciate information like, "Oh hey, you guys are aware that
>  6 miles up the road you haven't built yet is a huge chasm - you might
>  want to start thinking about how to build a bridge!" or "Hey guys...we
>  just talked to the people in the city, and it looks like you might
>  need an additional lane for all the traffic you're going to be
>  getting."  And when the road is done, it never hurts to let them know
>  that - hey! - 95% of the community thinks that your road is freakin
>  awesome.
>  
> >>Possibly? 
>  Basically, doing end-user research accomplishes a few things - it lets
>  engineering know what is going right, and what is not going so right,
>  and maybe what can be done to fix it.  There are also tons of untapped
>  potential community members out there; if we present them with a list
>  of ways to participate, rather than expecting them to find a niche on
>  their own, we can get more participants.
>  
> >>EXACTLY!!!! How will anyone new to the area be able to find
> your "house" 
without a map or directions?



>  I'm pretty sure that was fairly incoherent.  I'll be going to find
>  some caffeine now. :)
>  
> >>Don't worry. You were pretty coherent :) 
>  -robyn
>
>  >
>  >
>  > On Wednesday 14 October 2009 14:22:11 Gregory Zysk wrote:
>  >> One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
>  >> mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within
>  the
>  >> Fedora Project?
>  >>
>  >> As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetricsviews
>  >> that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January of
>  >> 2006. That is until June of 2009.
>  >
>  > Just for notice - Fedora is far more than the Ambassadors Group which is
>  only
>  > a (large) sub-project
>  >
>  >> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
>  >> sub-questions:
>  >> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
>  >
>  > In the past the Ambassador Group was often used by new Contributors as an
>  > entry level Group - which is what the Ambassador Group is definitely not
>  -
>  > because you have not only to present Fedora as an OS - also the Project
>  itself
>  > and therefore it is imperative to know the project better than anybody
>  else.
>  > This is the reason why we have established a strong mentoring process and
>  have
>  > a new membership process.
>  >
>  > You can see the result, who they are where they are from ...
>  > for the last month's here
>  > https://fedorahosted.org/fama/report/6
>  >
>  >> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
>  >
>  > this should be easy to get from FAS by writing a script -  is there a
>  > volunteer around ;) ?
>  >
>  >> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>  >
>  > You will notice the incursion in Jun 09 this was a big clean up
>  > of inactive accounts
>  > http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
>  >
>  >
>  > Hope this helps to clarify a bit
>  >
>  > cu Joerg
>  >
>  > --
>  > Joerg (kital) Simon
>  > jsimon(a)fedoraproject.org
>  > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoergSimon
>  > http://kitall.blogspot.com
>  > Key Fingerprint:
>  > 3691 0989 2DCA 58A2 8D1F 2CAC C823 558E 5B5B 5688
>  >
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>  >
>
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