Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 21:43 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

> Neither can be done without an outside/neutral polling agency
> contacting and getting responses from at least 600-3000 random Fedora
> users. The poll that was given was one that could be easily stuffed
> and not easily proven that it wasn't. Relying on the forum for data is
> bad science and makes this whole argument more and more farcical. I am

Again, when I'm trying to be a scientist, I'll be sure and let you know.
=) The poll wasn't intended to be a statistically valid indication of
the entire Fedora user base. For the record, I don't think it's
sufficiently strong to support the claims Kevin is trying to make it
support.

I don't think it was stuffed, though, for a couple of reasons. One, it
wasn't discussed anywhere outside the forums until over 100 votes were
in (and the percentages then were about the same as they are now). Two,
when a poll's being stuffed, you usually see a large amount of votes
arrive in a lump; I've been watching the vote counts for the poll, and
that hasn't happened, they've mostly dribbled in a few at a time.

BTW, it would be very difficult to take up your suggestion, as we don't
*have* a big list of All Fedora Users for the external polling agency to
generate a random list from. All the usable lists of Fedora-related
people we have probably suffer from some kind of selection bias. The
best would be the Smolt data, but of course that's not identifiable in
any way you could use to contact people.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net