The vision for the Fedora Workstation

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 07:24:14PM +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> Anyway as people have pointed out the claim is being made that we
> are loosing users and or contributors.
> That claim seems to be made without any research or evidence to back
> it up so we cant determine the root cause of it or simply *if* it's
> actually taking place not someones "gut feeling".

I agree to some extent. The state of the Fedora is strong, and there's more
hand-wringing than perhaps necessary. However, I don't think it's fair to
say that everyone with this concern is basing it on nothing. A lot of it
came from seeing numbers on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics *
decline steeply, and there's been a lot of different finger-pointing as to
what caused it -- Gnome and systemd, competitors' popularity, and so on. My
own suspicion is that RHEL 6 came out and caused a dip. Seth told me that
there was a similar dip when RHEL 5 came out. And I bet we'll see a similar
dip with F21, after the RHEL 7 release. Since we're making big changes for
F21, that kind of ruins the science, so we'll see what happens.


* this hasn't been updated in a while since there's a problem with the data
source -- Robyn is working on it.

> If we truly are loosing users or contributors and not knowing why,
> it wont help us gain those users back or new users because we dont
> know what we should be doing better and from the looks of it we dont
> seem to be putting any effort into figuring out how we are going to
> be measuring if the .next and the wg's output are being successful
> et all so in the end we might just be doing ourselves more harm then

I would really like any ideas on how we could measure better. It's a hard
problem. The things we can easily count (like IP connections) don't really
tell us much anyway. What kind of things do you think we should measure, and
how should we do it?

This is really a discussion for a broader list, I suppose.

But anyway, my point is that this is about growing, not about panicking
about an imaginary or real loss. And there's many ways in which we can grow
-- I don't think we need numbers to tell us that.

-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>