----- Original Message ----- > From: "Stephen John Smoogen" <smooge@xxxxxxxxx> > To: "Fedora community advisory board" <board-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Sent: Wednesday, July 2, 2014 8:39:10 PM > Subject: Re: What is success for Fedora? > > > > > On 2 July 2014 03:01, Christian Schaller < cschalle@xxxxxxxxxx > wrote: > > > To me any definition of success needs to be tied to popular adoption of the > products we make, any measure of success that doesn't take that into account > becomes to me a version of congratulating yourself for having achieved > freedom of speech by putting yourself in a situation where there is > nobody around to listen to what you have to say. > > So if we for instance define long term success as having a 50%+ marketshare > among our target audiences, then I think a per release success criteria would > be that each product release sees a significant userbase bump. how we define > significant and how we measure the growth is of course another question, but > I am sure that if we agree that this is a good way to do it then I am sure we > can find some indicators to use for measurement and decide on ambitious but > realistic goal for each release. > > > My problem with this definition is that what do you 'git blame' for the > reason that user levels either fall or don't grow. I mean its easy to blame > whatever big change happened in that release.. but its a knee-jerk reaction. > It has as much as basis as the person who made the change defending it. [We > have had big dropoffs of users in the past which could be linked to us > dropping Xen, moving to GNOME3, beefy miracle offended vegeterians, aliens > invaded new york, etc but is it really that? Did other distributions see an > increase in their usage or did they see drops at the same time? How do we > get a reasonable guess and how do we fix it? [Uninvade New York? Add Xen > back? etc] > > Also when do you measure usage of a release and say 'yay we met our growth > metric'. Because what happens is that a release doesn't go from 19 -> 20 on > the day of the release. N usually gets to the number of users of N-1 just as > N+1 is released. Our overall growth is in people keep using old old releases > (we have a lot of Fedora 12, 14, and 17 users which don't seem to shrink > which means our 'usage' curve goes up but not in the latest release). > > Finally, how do we measure what the size of our target audience is? It is > just as hard to count as counting who our 'contributors' and 'users' are. Is > it a subset of the 1.9% of current non-MacOSx/Windows users? Is it the > MacOSx/Windows market? We say everyone and we can basically fold up shop now > because that doesn't look feasible, we say 20,000 people we can say have > "Mission Accomplished" and go home. > > We will hopefully be better able to measure usage of > workstation/server/cloud/everything better in the next release if each > release will give some indication to yum or dnf that the person is updating > from that 'platform'. Well I don't think we will ever find a perfect and 100% accurate measure, so what we would need to do instead is pick a set of indicators to watch like a combination of overall tracked Fedora product downloads during a release series, pick a few conferences to poll the attendees about operating system usage (JBoss and OpenStack conferences could possibly be good choices while GUADEC, Akademy or Flock would likely be bad choices :)) and Google trends for example. So none of them would give us a 100% accurate answer, but combined we should be able to at least detect trends from them. Of course the exact indicator composition would wary a bit between the 3 products. Christian _______________________________________________ board-discuss mailing list board-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/board-discuss
