Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Felipe Contreras
<felipe contreras gmail com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Andy Wingo <wingo pobox com> wrote:
>> On Fri 19 Aug 2011 13:33, Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com> writes:
>>
>>> That's a reasonable alternative. How about "pleased"? Any other people
>>> have an opinion?
>>
>> You present yourself as reasonable by adjusting on the small points,
>> but you ignore the feedback of greater importance.
>>
>> My opinion is that you are not the right person to lead an effort to
>> gather feedback on GNOME.
>
> Is there anyone in the universe able to create a user survey worthy of
> GNOME? Can you convince him of doing so?

Gathering feedback does not necessarily require an online user survey.
As stated, for a project which currently targets, among others, users
who do not care what parts of their operating system can be labelled
"GNOME" a survey is not a very reliable way of gathering feedback.

Have you ever tried to explain, to a person who doesn't have an
interest in software, what GNOME actually is?

> In the meantime, this is the best that we have. I will continue
> listening for constructive feedback, but comments such as "this is not
> good", "you are doing it wrong", "it's impossible", lead to nowhere.
>
> Besides, as Alan Cox said, it doesn't have to be perfect, like
> software, we can learn from the mistakes of the 2011 survey, and make
> a better one for 2012. Can we not?

I urge you to consider the fact that if the majority of people
subscribed to desktop-devel-list don't have faith in idea of an online
user survey, an online user survey is probably not going to much have
effect on the views of the people who contribute to the discussions on
desktop-devel-list, and since most of the GNOME community read
desktop-devel-list you can probably extend this to all of the other
GNOME mailing lists and IRC channels as well.

Sam