Re: roadmap status update/update request

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 11:14 -0800, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
>>I've seen hundreds of web polls
>
>The idea was that this would be a Gnome-sponsored poll and it would attract 
>people from many sites, not just osnews or this mailing list. The idea would 
>be to get at least 300,000 people vote (I can get you 50-60,000 voters out 
>of the 250,000 daily osnews readers, the rest must be done via ml, slashdot, 
>gnomedesktop etc). I think that's a way better number of people 
>participating than MOST commercial companies would ever dream of to make a 
>market research on. They usually do their researches based on a sample of 
>2-3,000 people. Gnome would have 100 times that, and so I do take it that it 
>would be accurate "enough". Besides, with my poll experiences on osnews, the 
>polls do seem to be representative of what most people want.

The problem with all these voting systems is that they
have sample bias written all over them.  The majority
of users, real users, don't go onto bugzilla, and they
don't vote in web polls on osnews.  Market research is
not the same thing as polling the enthusiast community.

Here's an example:  By far, the most vocal complaint
I've had about Yelp is the lack of man page support.
Does anybody really think that's the most critical
missing feature?  Does my mother care about man pages?

And I *did* implement a voting system for Yelp features,
but nobody voted:

http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/wishlist

I'll bet developers would take votes more seriously if
people backed them up with something other than flames
on slashdot and osnews comments.

--
Shaun