PROPOSAL: Fedora user survey

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 10:48 PM, Jon Masters <jonathan at jonmasters.org> wrote:
> 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 :)

Did someone say... SURVEY?? :)

Well. I know the Marketing team would like to know the answers to some
of these generic, demographical questions, which is why we're also
planning a general end-user survey. :)  Marketing FAD is this weekend
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_FAD_2010) and one of our task
items is to develop questions for a general Fedora end-user survey.
While this is obviously not going to be solely developer-focused,
developing a short list of feedback-oriented, rather than
vote-oriented questions, with FESCo would be great.

By feedback oriented, I mean that questions should be more along the
lines of, "What is your current level of satisfaction with X," rather
than, "Which of the following should we do? X, Y, or Z?"

(In case you're wondering, or getting ready to flame Robyn, the survey
is mostly going to be a "who are you, where are you, what are you
using Fedora for, how often are you downloading, how do you
participate, etc." type of survey.  We will have room for more
questions, but we do want to keep in mind that having a 350-question
survey is a Bad Idea, so we want to be concise and to the point in
order to encourage people to actually -finish- the survey. 5-10
minutes, max.  Wiki page is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research)

We're planning on using limesurvey (limesurvey.org) for infrastructure
- once we get it packaged (plz come help! :D) and tested and deployed
on fp.o infrastructure, we're going to move ahead.  And so - if anyone
from devel / FESCo is interested in participating in developing a few
questions to tack on to our survey - as I said previously, awesome,
and I'd be happy to coordinate details on the marketing list.

Alternately, since we do plan on allowing any of the fp.o Family to
use limesurvey for their own survey needs once it's up and running -
you certainly have the option of running your own survey on the
infrastructure, and I'd be happy to help word questions appropriately
and such.

And of course, the option exists to do something entirely different on
your own. :)

Food for thought. It never hurts to know who end users are - it is
just good to be clear up front in a survey that it is a -survey-, and
not a -vote-; results are for feedback, not for making immediate
decisions, and the questions should be worded as such.

I'll be in the corner with my flame-retardant gear on if anyone has
questions :D  But seriously: We'd love to have a good success with a
first survey, and that means having feedback from all the different
Fedora teams.  We want to get information that is useful to everyone -
and NOT let it be an election of any kind.

-Robyn



>
> 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.

+1  :)

>
>
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