On 7/7/05, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Marketing: Where do we stand in terms of number of users and what kind > of users Fedora is attracting You need to be very careful here... Are there plans to attract or discourage a specific "kind" of user? I'm not sure knowing precise numbers as to the demographics of users provides any useful information unless there is a stated goal or a commitment to service a specific demographic or a stated goal or commitment to reach certain adoption levels (relative or absolute) among different demographics. I haven't seen any discussion about aims or goals about demographics targets. If Fedora installs seem to be relatively low in Finland compared to Brazil, does it matter? Is there a number of installed systems target we are shooting for? If Fedora is popular with one "kind" of users and not so popular with another "kind" of user... do you work to balance that, even if it means making it less popular with the larger group? Or do you aim efforts at making things more appealing to the "kind" of user already drawn to the project and the distro? I think these larger questions need to be answered before you collect any demographics data. As I said before, Gnome at least has some (wacky) stated adoption goals for which that want data for to use to track progress towards that goal. Fedora doesn't have any adoption goals really, and until we agree on goals with regard to adoption demographics I don't see a reason to collect data about it. > Development : What type of hardware works, Is there a commitment from anyone to actually mine that data as it comes in? And just as importantly... to follow up on reports of brokenness as updated packages come. A usable HCL list is going to take real manpower.. and can't be automated. Creating a big data dump without someone committed to actively maintain it seems counter-productive to me. You run the very real risk of having issues linger as "broken" well after they are fixed. if it takes 6 months for a human being to actual mine data about broken hardware... thats not particularly useful information for this project, thats a pretty long time scale in comparison to how quickly update packages get pushed out that impact hardware. This might be useful raw data for developers, I'd like to see what the kernel and X.org developers think about auto-collecting data about "working" or "broken" hardware and if having a big datadump like that would be useful for them in terms of identifying problem areas. If they don't find it useful to build up databank of "raw" data, its probably not going to be worthwhile for end-users. An end-user oriented HCL is going to require a team of people who are committed to sifting through the reports and following up on broken issues as they get fixed with updates quickly. I want to see people step up and commit to that before data is collected. >Whats packages is being utilised more?. What can be moved into extras? Even if you could measure the utility of a package in an accurate way that reasonable accounted for the skew related to "default installs.".. i've seen NO credible discussion among the release team nor the Core developers that popularity or utility is an important criteria for any decisions with regard to Core. I do not want data to be collected about popularity until there is consensous that relative "popularity", "installed", or "usage" of a package is something that is actually going to impact decision-making by the people who actually make those decisions. Taking this data, without a commitment to use this data.. is just going to create opportunities for people to argue unconstructively. First get agreement from Core release team and maintiainers that "utility" or "popularity" of a package is important to the decision to keep it in Core or not, then take the data if that is the concensous view of the people who make these decisions. -jef -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
