Re: Modifying GNOME-About to count users

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Luis Villa">

> 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 :)

That's how the conversation (on #marketing) started, and where the "multiple
data sources" line came from. I know of various data sources in Ubuntu land
that would be helpful, but we do have to keep in mind that this is often
seen as valuable data, not to be thrown about.

> 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.

So [1], I would be a little bit hesitant to use it for the memberdb because
that's a lot of infrastructure for a little bit of functionality. That said,
there's a lot of crap memberdb software around, and the civicspace modules
are quite simple and good (ignoring everything underneath for a moment). As
it happens, Linux Australia have a pretty good membership database, so that
might be an option too.

Most obvious question: What is the base functionality the Foundation
requires?

- Jeff

[1] keeping in that drupal *may* be considered for chunkier tasks, so it may
just fall into place very nicely

-- 
GNOME Summit 2005: October 8th-10th         http://live.gnome.org/Boston2005
 
     "Free software never simply picks up its marbles and goes home." -
                            Jonathan Corbet, LWN