Re: Modifying GNOME-About to count users

[John Williams <jwilliams business otago ac nz>]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 16:49 -0700, Rob Adams wrote:
> If it's off by default we may as well not bother to include it, since it
> will be utterly useless in counting measures.  We'd just as well have a
> web poll to track market share.
Well, I'm not so sure.  (But I take your point seriously.)  The thinking is that GNOME users look at the about-gnome box at least once.

If the option of enabling this function was presented right, a large
proportion of users _may_ enable it.  We have no real way of knowing how
large a proportion at this stage, but we can do research in the future
to determine this.

> We can avoid accusations of privacy violations through the very
> transparency under which we develop everything: The source code for the
> client and the server.
I happen to agree with you, but I think many others would not.

> The question that remains to answer is: Are the statistics sufficiently
> valuable as to be useful?  
Yes, yes yes!   I could not agree more.  We have been agonising over
this for some time.  If you want to help, please visit

http://live.gnome.org/CountingUsers

read it, think about it then add your thoughts for doing things better.


> What do we compare them to to determine
> market share?  
The total number of computer users in the world.  Publicly available
information.

> If its just so we can have a counter on the home page,
> probably not worth it.
To some people no, to others yes.  I could be quite inspirational to
some people to see that number increasing.

Please read the wiki to find the rationale for all this.  Then, I for
one would really like to hear how we can improve the proposals we have
considered so far.

cheers,

John


http://live.gnome.org/JohnWilliams