RE: university outreach project

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, John Williams wrote:

> P.S.  I am starting to think about writing up a grant request at my
> school.  If you have any burning questions that could be answered with
> around NZD$5,000 (with research design, analysis and reporting for free)
> please let me know.  I will post further thoughts when I have them.
>
> (Reminder: I am at Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand.)

Something that would be relevant to all free software projects (including
GNOME) is answering questions such as:
        How do we find how many users do we have?
        How do we create a representative sample of those users so we can 
        do surveys/interviews/etc. and come up with meaningful results?

Answering those questions _in the context of open source_ seems like a
really hard problem, because we don't have any sales data to use, and
because using online polls to gauge user opinion suffers from severe
non-responder bias.

What are your thoughts there?
-- Elliot
We're so busy putting out fires that we don't take time to stop kids from
playing with matches.