On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 13:15 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote: > On Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:04:31 -0800 > Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > ...snip... > > > What do people make of this? > > I'm no expert on polls/polling, but I suspect that many of the people > who are more interested in a 'stable/less updates' Fedora don't > frequent things like the forums or users list. Sure, they might search > it or post a question when they run into an issue, but they are more > likely to spend their time... well, using their machine. Yeah. This is by no means a representative sampling of Fedora users. The term you're looking for here is selection bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias Adam's poll results are valid *only* for Fedora users who: a) Are members of the Fedora forum, b) Enthusiasts/power-users to the degree that they would notice a new threads/poll within a day of its posting, and c) Hold a strong enough opinion to feel the need to answer the poll. It seems obvious that this group would lean more towards the adventurous, power-user side of things. Furthermore (as Mike points out later in the thread) the presentation of the poll is also problematic. The choices - "conservative" or "adventurous" - are subjective and each have strong emotional implications. "Conservative" typically has negative connotations, especially among enthusiasts and power-users. Adam, I definitely applaud your effort to gather some actual data on the problem, but the data gathered here is not going to tell us anything we don't already know. If we spent some time designing a more proper survey and chose an actual random representative sampling of Fedora users - random sampling from FAS accounts, website users, forum accounts, bugzilla accounts, etc. - that data might be more relevant. But even then, what will we learn? I'd be willing to wager that the data would distill down to three facts which are already practically axiomatic: 1) Nearly everyone wants Fedora to be as stable as possible. 2) Nearly everyone wants Fedora to be advanced and featureful. 3) Some people are willing to sacrifice stability for features. So the only unknown is: exactly what percentage of our *current* users are willing to accept a loss of stability in favor of New Hotness? But I'm fairly certain this question is *irrelevant*. Our current users' expectations are already set by their past experience with Fedora. If they're still Fedora users, they're willing to accept - and *have* accepted - whatever we're currently doing. In short: I fully support gathering actual data, but I think it would be more useful to gather data to help shape overall *goals*, and work toward those goals. It might also be useful to poll people *outside* our current user/developer base and find out what we'd need to do to attract *new* users and contributors. -w -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
