= Proposal topic =
Annual Fedora User Survey
= Overview =
I propose an annual survey of the Fedora user base, to be advertized on start.fedoraproject.org, on the wiki, and by sending a Press Release to organizations such as Slashdot, LWN, etc. The Survey will ask users questions of importance to the Fedora project, and be used to gather input on how the project is doing, what potential problems exist, and how to improve in the future. This will increase relevance to the typical users of Fedora.
= Problem space =
Today, we have a number of potential issues in the Fedora community. We don't know who are users are in terms of demographic, we're not sure if update churn rate is a good or bad thing to our users, and we're not sure why (anecdotally) some of them are leaving for other distributions. And we should know these things. It is important that we treat our users as customers of the Fedora distribution and try to ascertain what it is they are looking for when they install Fedora. Do they use Fedora because they want the latest and greatest, even if it breaks their system sometimes? Are they happy with the current cycle? What else are they looking for?
= Solution Overview =
Conduct a survey. Either independently run, or implemented by means of an openly reviewed list of questions. A period of consultation shall be opened during which active members of the Fedora development community can contribute question proposals (there shall be a pre-determined notion of the acceptable maximum number of questions and time taken to answer), which shall somehow be reviewed and approved before being posted to all current/former/potential Fedora users by way of an online survey. Various measures can be taken in order to ensure against abuse.
= Active Ingredients =
All Fedora developers are affected because the survey will be used to gauge what it is that Fedora users and developers want to see in the distribution.
= Owners =
I can own if it needed. I would appreciate assistance.
"who are users are" should of course be who our users are. Excuse my typo.
You can merge this with 350 if you like. I still want a "yes" or "no" answer with a justification. The question of how to implement this is secondary, and I will talk to the marketing folks on Monday about that.
adding meeting keyword.
Please let me know when you are going to discuss (time, etc.) this and whether I may participate. I generally read meeting minutes and so forth after the event.
This should be on the agenda for the next meeting, which will be at 19:30UTC (3:30pm EDT) in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net on 2010-08-31.
If you can attend and provide input that would be great.
I've been wanting to do this for some time and would be happy happy happy to help. Just let me know.
If someone wants to help me (and by help I mean, "I can't package, sorry") finish packaging / deploying limesurvey on our infrastrucure we can actually host this ourselves. (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Things_to_do_to_finish_Limesurvey - list is woefully out of date, sparks and ke4qqq have been working on things as time allows.)
Fesco is fine with this moving forward.
Hopefully it can be done in the open and with input from people who know how to write polls in a neutral manner. Also, note that this is data (which is great), but there's no promise here to change things (especially things beyond our control) just based on this data.
jcm is going to talk to the board and the marketing sig about moving this forward.
I sent mail to the FAB. I will check the meeting minutes after the meeting tomorrow to ensure that they discussed this topic. If they do not get chance to discuss it this week, I will raise it again next week, and so on.
I've placed this on the Board's agenda for tomorrow.
Er, that'd be Friday, not tomorrow.
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