Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)

[Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, do you have a better suggestion?

> 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?

Again, do you have a suggestion to get feedback in a more useful way?

>> 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.

So the status quo, where there are absolutely no numbers whatsoever is
preferred. Any attempt to gather quantifiable feedback is discouraged.
IOW; the GNOME community does not care about what users have to say at
all.

-- 
Felipe Contreras