Hi Caolan, all! Am Freitag, den 29.10.2010, 14:31 +0100 schrieb Caolan McNamara: > On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 13:56 +0100, Michael Meeks wrote: > > On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 11:15 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: [...] > > * Cons of registration page > > Agree with all of that. Another way of viewing this IMO, is that if it > didn't already exist noone would suggest adding a dialog shown during > startup in order to collect what I believe is very dubious and skewed > information. e.g. I don't think a single Linux distribution that shipped > OpenOffice.org left the dialog enabled, so noone using the OOo shipped > with Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL/Suse/etc was counted.
Since distributions like Ubuntu do also provide to collect usage statistics of installed packages, there is already some similar information source. Ubuntu does that to improve the collection of software, to better suit their user's needs. So the real point is: What is required for us to improve LibO and to make it more successful? Example: If a project gets a certain size, then there will be the need to base decisions (both for the project and the product) on valid information (number of users, there likings, common work flows, essential templates, ...). In my opinion, gut feeling (only) doesn't serve some of our needs in the long run. Personally, I don't like the "register" approach, but I do like good ways of gathering helpful information that isn't available elsewhere. We can be sure that the structure of people using OOo/LibO isn't identical to those we get direct feedback from. So the question is (as you stated it), if there is nothing in the product ... what would be our approach to let our users help us to better shape LibO? The idea "User Feedback" / "Improvement Program" / "Usage Tracking" that is available in OOo is one puzzle piece. There are some rough edges, and the data currently needs some manual pre-processing, and there is still missing information - but it already helped to convert "just features" into something that "just works for the majority". So my proposal would be: There might be no need for a registration dialog, but there is a need by development, marketing, UX to get some information. Maybe not today, but tomorrow (literally speaking). But, I also second Florians thoughts that there should have some discussion in advance before removing it. By the way, some people worked on (limited) data collection for The Gimp. Just fun to look at (serious data): http://ingimp.org/ Cheers, Christoph -- E-mail to [email protected] for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/steering-discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
