PROPOSAL: Fedora user survey

[Jon Masters]

On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 17:30 -0500, Chris Ball wrote:

> 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.

You could argue that only certain really interested parties will look at
fedoraproject.org, but that's why I was suggesting the start page or
firstboot (bad idea, I know), or something people will see when they
first open a browser or use a system. Not just the die hards.

My personal opinion is that user feedback in general is a good thing,
even if you ultimately choose to disregard it. And I think putting a
survey up for 6 months (e.g. all of F13) would give plenty of time to do
reasonably useful statistical analysis of opinions. Shove in a few other
more generic questions if there are any others - e.g. "what do you use
Fedora for anyway?". Wouldn't that be good to know :)

Jon.

P.S. The government is elected, doesn't mean they don't still hold a
census every decade to find out who their users are.