Re: Modifying GNOME-About to count users

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

[Trying again to narrow it down to the marketing list, but failing,
because I want the web list cc'd as well- web-list, see the last
pgph.]

On 7/6/05, John Williams <jwilliams business otago ac nz> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 16:48 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> > > "Join Friends of GNOME and celebrate easy to use software for $OS!" (email
> > > form)
> > >
> > > What question are we asking? :-)
> >
> > I *think* we're asking 'how many users of GNOME are there', not 'how
> > many discovered gnome-about in their panel and then decided to fill
> > out a form for an organization they know nothing about'.
> 
> That is so true. However I believe there is no harm in pursuing both
> options right now. Imperfect numbers (that catch a
> less-than-100-percent proportion of GNOME users) have the redeeming
> feature of establishing a lower bound on the count, which is better than
> nothing.

Hrm. Interesting point. I admit I've been sceptical of this entire
line of thinking, but framing it that way makes sense.

If we seek to create a lower bound, perhaps we could focus on getting
lower-bound type numbers from our distributors, or (perhaps more
fruitfully) from mirrors? I'm guessing the Fedora torrent stats and
ubuntu turrent stats, summed, are a way larger lower bound than any
opt-in system we can implement :) Tim, have we ever spoken to our
corporate partners to getting their best estimates on desktop users of
their distros?
 
> Whose toes would we be stepping on if we pushed this "Friends of GNOME"
> thing?

No toes mangled, and besides, it should be done for other reasons,
regardless of its utility in this case.

>  I can not see any objection to it other than it is not ideal for
> counting GNOME users. So, if I can help in any way (I have (X)HTML/CSS
> skills and (ver) modest shell/perl/C/C++/java skills) please let me
> know.

Seems like step 1 is 'implement a real member database for FOG.'  I'd
love for someone (hello, web-team! :) to set up a civicspace[1] (or
similar) user DB for FOG, so that we know who has become an FOG,
whether or not we can contact them, how much they've given, etc., etc.

Tim's feedback on this issue would be great, since he's been tracking
all the FOG stuff already (I have no idea in what way) and he might
have pointers/comments/etc.

Once a DB exists (which we should probably have no matter what for the
existing FOG infrastructure, so that we can efficiently
contact/credit/grow FOG-as-fundraiser) it would be easy enough to
write a pygtk dialog that pulls info from the 'About Me' dialog and
submits it (with relevant safeguards, etc., etc.) to that new DB.

thanks for continuing to push this, John-
Luis
[1] http://civicspacelabs.org/home/civicspace