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My IRC nick is: ndroftheline
Please briefly describe the interaction that caused you to file this ticket: n/a
Please note other IRC nicks that are involved in this interaction:
Please describe what action or positive change could be adopted based on this feedback:
Dear Fedora Project rockstars,
Mainly my thought is that feedback should be easier to provide. I understand the need to validate users to reduce/eliminate spam. I understand there are some technical aspects to the current ticketing system that make it very convenient. But feedback should be easier.
It's a core aspect of human behavior modification: to encourage adoption, new behaviors must be incentivized. We want people to provide valid feeback, right? How do we incentivize feedback?
Of course, a user with a good or bad experience may feel the incentive automatically to tell people about it, and wilfully and purposefully seek out a way to provide feedback. Unfortunately, I think these people are the minority, and provide a generally skewed picture anyway - you're only getting extremely motivated (and thus, biased) people's feedback, and thus only dealing with the corner cases, and so the feedback is less useful.
In addition to these rare, powerful internally motivated cases, #fedora has provided additional incentives in the simplest, most efficient way possible: by asking. The repeating message from fedbot simply asks people to provide feedback, and this is a great idea. However it is a fairly weak incentive.
If a user does decide to provide feedback, they are presented with a text-heavy, boring page - a weak counter-incentive. They are required to create an FAS account, which while not difficult, is at the very least inconvenient, especially for a new user who only wants to provide moderate feedback. This, I would say, is a stronger counter-incentive. The significance of these counter-incentives to providing feedback must not be ignored.
If the goal of this feedback system is to get high-quality, regular feedback that can help guide IRC improvements, we should (continue to) increase incentives and/or decrease counter-incentives.
Some ideas to do this, and relative effort to accomplish each:
Simplify and beautify the feedback landing page with graphics and charts, especially colorful buttons and a "how to feedback" graphical flowchart. Easy.
Simplify and beautify the feedback form itself - it doesn't need to look like a bug report to the user if it's just feedback on an IRC convo. Keywords? Blocked by? Severity? Priority? From a noob perspective, these things are confusing and do not provide useful information anyway; of course, if somebody is upset, they'll say "priority: critical!" but this doesn't give us any really useful information. Create a new, simpler, easier feedback form, or migrate to a wholly different feedback system, that uses a simpler, easier form. Think surveymonkey. Medium.
Use a channel bot to manage feedback, possibly in a dedicated channel. This is a registered freenode user, so it's not totally anonymous and it probably wouldn't be worthwhile to a spammer. It would allow the user to reference the assocaited users very quickly and easily using IRC's autocomplete features. It would give us a timestamp of the feedback which we could later go through to review on an unpublished IRC log the Fedora channel might have. Difficult, maybe impossible.
Create a karma system for #fedora support users. Perhaps make some kind of position for IRC moderators, superusers, assistants, whatever you want to call them - poeple who are active in IRC. Create a vote up/vote down system that rewards them for being helpful and punishes them for being mean, dismissive, unhelpful, or otherwise egregiously violating the guidelines. Difficult, maybe impossible, and possibly a stretch.
I do not think a different feedback system is going to radically transform our community, but it is a step we can take to improve it and learn from our users, and not just the extremely happy or extremely disgruntled ones.
Ultimately I hope the feedback system can be renamed a "kudos system" as our community becomes more positive and inclusive. For now, if we're going to ask for feedback, let's incentivize it by making it pleasing and easy.
Any additional notes or logs:
Thanks for your feedback!
To expand a little on the karma concept: the only way this will be useful is if it's advertised and explained to users, the karma is persistent over some moderate period of time, and can be tracked to a given user in a relatively reliable way.
Also please note that as I mentioned, the karma thing is a stretch. There are some serious potential detriments to a system that allows direct, personal negative feedback to mark a user's reputation in a permanent way.
I think we should focus on the other, simpler, lower-hanging-fruits like making the standard feedback easier and more accessible first before bothering with such a system with potentially wide-ranging impact.
So, first thanks for typing this up and thinking about it. ;)
We have discussed this kind of thing in the past, but revisiting is always a good idea, IMHO.
Several things to consider:
anonymous feedback is much less interesting to me personally, as it prevents you from having any kind of dialog with the submitter. If you get an anonymous "nirik sucks!" feedback, what do you do with it? You can't ask them what caused the issue or how to improve things. :(
Making a fas account is a slight burden, it's true... but in addition to making sure there's an email address we can have a dialog with, it also allows them to more easily contibute to other parts of Fedora.
We do actually have a karma plugin in fedbot, but as you note it's not really advertised and not very useful. We could look at making it more useful or advertised if folks think it would be good.
Using trac is an easy choice as it's provided and maintained for us by Fedora Infrastructure. Other solutions might not be. We could indeed look at simplifying the trac forms and such.
We do have a step by step about submitting feedback in:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha/How_to_file_a_trac_ticket
We should get that finished and point to it.
Anyhow, hope you can make our next meeting (thursday at 18UTC in #fedora-meeting), or if not, we can keep discussing it here and come to some conclusion. :)
* anonymous feedback is much less interesting to me personally as it prevents you from having any kind of dialog with the submitter.
I agree, and I'm glad I had someone to check me in #fedora-social when I first suggested it. Please note I did not suggest anonymous feedback in this ticket, and I would like to keep this conversation away from that. Continuing the dialog is a great point, which I had only vaguely considered! I think this should inform any decisions to open up the feedback system - establishing and extending a dialog with these users is critical to deepening their relationship with the project.
What about this: a page that looks like a forum comment that collects only 4 things: name, email, feedback, and IRC log. This data is held in some database that sends a confirmation email to the submitting user's email address which contains a simple "click to validate your feedback" link. Once the user clicks the link, the database submits the feedback as a trac ticket just like the current system. This provides a way to collect useful feedback from a validated address (and thus establish a dialog), while also lowering the barrier to providing feedback. Of course, if a person already has an FAS account and wants to give feedback, the validation step should be skippable.
* Making a fas account ... also allows them to more easily contibute to other parts of Fedora.
Wow, another great point that I hadn't thought about. I would contend that, if a person is new to Fedora and has a really bad experience in #fedora, they are unlikely to be interested in contributing to Fedora (ie, make a FAS account) unless we can establish a dialog with them in the first place by getting them to submit feedback - so we should make it easier to submit feedback. That is, if we don't require an FAS account, we make it more likely they'll ultimately want (and use!) an FAS account.
* Using trac is an easy choice as it's provided and maintained for us by Fedora Infrastructure. Other solutions might not be. We could indeed look at simplifying the trac forms and such.
This is what I'd like to emphasize - simplify the trac form for providing IRC feedback. What does simplify mean? Obviously this is a question of perspective and I would like to firmly ground the default IRC feedback trac form in the perspective of The Noob - that is, make it linear and pretty.
* We do have a step by step about submitting feedback in: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha/How_to_file_a_trac_ticket We should get that finished and point to it.
Is it possible to just include those instructions and graphics in a single line at the top of the feedback landing page? I think that would be preferable to linking. This is a great first step - but lets make the buttons easier to find! And the graphics/instructions need to be updated - the pics indicate Login, but the link is now OpenID Login.
<rant> This whole thing about collecting feedback is, in my opinion, closely tied to the direction Fedora might be going in. The other night in #fedora-social I participated in a conversation about the direction of the Fedora Project. The idea that Fedora should be a developer-oriented project was floated and I must say I think that Fedora is very well positioned to be a developer-oriented project. I mean, Fedora is upstream of RHEL and all RHEL-related projects. It's quite telling when a single project adopts a new method for doing something (like, say, systemd) and suddenly the entire ecosystem starts rumbling about how the new change is being forced on them. That says that what Fedora does has quite an impact on the ecosystem, because the ecosystem sees that Fedora lies upstream of it - and that eventually, whatever Fedora adopts, will become more-or-less standard across the board. My point being that Fedora pretty much defines what it means to be a project leading development. A project for developers.
BUT - note the caps - what's a developer? Are we only talking about source hackers? What about web devs? What about people who make pretty logos? What about people who do translations, package other software, or "just" write documentation? What about people whose only contribution to the entire project is to file bug reports using the intergrated bug reporting tools?
I submit that these developers are absolutely critical to the proliferation of any Free community. And while using the term developer so loosely does seem strange, it's also not quite accurate to call any proper end user of a community project like Fedora just a user. Community projects don't operate that way, do they? This isn't a provider-client relationship. It's a community relationship we want to cultivate. Users of Fedora should be invited to join the community - they should be included and encouraged. They should fall in love with Fedora, like everybody reading this did at some point.
So how do we strengthen that relationship? How do we attract developers (using the term loosely again) to join and contribute to the project? Well, I think we can take lessons from researchers focused on customer loyalty. Like I said, it's not the same - we're not trying to attract customers, we're trying to cultivate community members - but it is strongly related and a lot of the psychology is highly informative.
http://www.guywinch.com/the-psychology-of-customer-loyalty/
A successful customer loyalty strategy must establish opportunities for a company to forge deep and personal connections with their customers. Fortunately, companies are provided perfect vehicles to create exactly this kind of relationship change—when customers voice complaints. Indeed, studies repeatedly demonstrate that successful service recoveries make customers more loyal to a company than they were before they ever encountered a problem. In addition, customers typically relate stories of successful service recoveries to numerous friends and acquaintances, providing excellent word of mouth for the company in question. Companies that want to increase customer loyalty should therefore make it as easy as possible for their customers to complain. In addition to gaining vital information about potential problems, excellent service recoveries enhances customers’ confidence and trust, deepens their emotional connection to the company and dramatically increases their customer loyalty.
So here we are at the crux of this rant. To deepen our community (and therefore make it more attractive to more expert devs) we need to make feedback easier to provide. This is not some one-off, it's a deep-seated aspect of human behavior. Problem resolution builds relationships, teams, and communities. Let's let our users identify problems, so we can resolve them, and then bring them into the fold.
Let's make Fedora a project that doesn't only cater to developers, but in fact makes them. Fedora the developer forge. </rant>
PS. I can't make the meeting. Tight sched this week, and that time is right in the middle of my work day.
Well, Fedora's audience is beyond the scope of the irc support sig. You might want to talk to the Fedora Board that has been discussing that.
My concern about a simpler web form would be: who creates it? Who hosts it? Who maintains it and fixes bugs and security issues?
On people making a FAS account just to file negative feedback... why do you assume it would be negative? :)
This was discussed at the 2013-05-16 meeting, calling for more discussion.
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/meetbot/teams/irc-support-sig/irc-support-sig.2013-05-16-18.00.html
This was never (3 months) followed up, so can be closed. Re-open if you want to re-visit this.
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