Who's the Fedora user?

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Aug 24 21:27:56 UTC 2005


On 8/24/05, Patrick Barnes <nman64 at n-man.com> wrote:
> I think having interests lists is a great idea, but I'm not sure that
> what you are thinking of is really something we should tackle.  What
> might be good for us is a small set of documents (I'm thinking in the
> wiki) that go over what users with particular interests might like to
> look in to.  

I think you missed my point. I will make it a little clearer. We can
write enough documentation to reach from the moon and back...but users
have to go read it. Documentation sitting on a website is a passive
response which will never reach some of the userbase. Some users are
only going to be reached by proactive "notification".

Using my wife as another example of this behavior in some users, since
she is of course the typical average user... the freebie games she
plays in windows are games she gets notified from a little
pre-installed taskbar icon. Some sort of online game company HP has a
partnership with. Every once in a while the little icon notifies her
of a new demo game..she downloads it and plays the few demo levels and
is amused. Would she actively search for these things? absolutely
not... but because she's being notified of new content (without being
overwhelmed. we are talking a notification a week or so) she is made
aware of it.

> I really don't think that collecting lists of users interests and
> sending out mailings would work out well.  It would take too many
> resources to manage, IMHO.  

If Eric Meyer's attempt at putting a happy face on the comps for
Extras bears fruit.. something of merit might be managable and
implementable as a clientside tool which scrapes comps.xml from the
yum configuration to notify users of new packages based on their
grouping. A neutral entity..is doable..but is an extra upfront burden,
because they have to be told about that neutral site.. and then they
have to register with that neutral site..and then they have to sift
through projects that are in Extras yet..to find things they can
actually get reasonable access to and use. A nuetral site.. like
freshmeat is exactly what I use to find 'interesting' things.. but I
have the skills to build them and package them myself.  I've seen far
too many people blunder into an addon project and try to rebuild it
and get confused to encourage freshmeat watching as THE solution for
average computer users.  Now the comps based notification approach
might not be as fine grained as I might have orignally concieved.. but
finding a way to notify users of 'interesting' new packages even by
comps group is going to lead to far less confusion than pointing all
fedora users to a nuetral site. Since so much effort is going into
actually building Fedora specific packages in Extras..I'd rather
notify Fedora users of that first and foremost.

-jef




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