On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Christophe Fergeau <t...@gnome.org> wrote: > 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras <felipe.contre...@gmail.com>: >> I other words, you are saying that it doesn't matter if 100% of the >> responders of this survey say GNOME has too few options, nothing would >> be done? Is there *any* kind of evidence that would convince GNOME ppl >> that users want more options? Or is it what the wishes of users are >> completely irrelevant? > > It seems you are starting under the assumption that the results of the > survey will be representative of G3 users as a whole.
My assumption is that some numbers are better than no numbers. > What are your > plans to make sure people unhappy with GNOME are not over represented > in the poll results? Publicize the survey as much as possible. Would you like to rephrase the survey to don't assume the respondent is using GNOME, and then ask this question? == Which desktop environment are you currently using? == This should spot the people that are more likely to be unhappy. > Given the kind of questions, it's bound to > attract answers from people who want more options, and I don't think > how we can go from "N% of the people who took the survey said they > wanted more options" to "M% of *all* G3 users want more options". To > me, these figures will be totally unrelated, unless I missed something > in the way you want to run the poll. They are certainly not the same, but if N = 100, you can say with certain degree of certainty that M is certainly not 0. Which value of N will convince you that M is high enough, I don't know (perhaps there isn't any). But trying to get a value of N as close as M as possible is better to what is available now, which is nothing. > Since your actual goal seems to use this survey results to pressure > people into adding more options to GNOME (where "more options" > probably really means "the options you want to have"), I'm afraid this > poll will turn into "I want to prove X, let's design a survey whose > result will be X". That's speculation. How would you design a survey to prove !X? It will be the same. > I even suspect that you'd get different results by > adding something like "Do you get confused by software with too many > configuration options ? Yes/No" " before asking the question about the > amount of configuration options ;) So you want to add bias? If you have been following the thread, you would see that the proposed changes are intended to decrease the bias. > In short, I think making a good poll is really hard, especially if you > want to use this poll to prove that some specific point is true or > not. Imo, the best we can get from a poll is "ok, some people think X, > unfortunately we have no idea about what the people who did not answer > the poll think" So you prefer, the status quo, which is "we have no idea about what anybody thinks". I say the reasonable thing to do is to try to improve the survey as much as possible to get as meaningful numbers as possible. After getting the numbers, _then_ you can decide what to do with them, if anything at all. -- Felipe Contreras _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list