Re: GNOME user survey 2011

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>]

2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>:
>>>> 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.
>>
>> Of course, but since we don't know how many people in total are using
>> G3, N=100 will only tell us that there are 100 people out of an
>> unknown number of users that want more options, and nothing more.
>
> Read your own text:
> "N% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options"
> ->
> "100% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options"

Since 100% really looked like election results in countries ruled by
dictators, I thought you were talking about number of people, not
percentage. And I didn't reread my email carefully enough. It seems
you managed to get my point anyway, so all is good :)

> If you think it's likely that N=100 maps to M=1 regardless of the
> number of responders, then I think I'll be wasting my time providing
> you with logical arguments.

No, I'm saying that I have no idea about how to map from N to M
whatever N is. By the way, I'm assuming that such a survey won't reach
a significant portion of our user base (ie a few percents at most)
which is why I keep saying we won't be able to infer much about M from
N. And I also suspect people who answer the survey will heavily be
"power-users", "geeks", and developers.

>
> First you get the numbers, then you try to make sense of them, and
> _then_ you can decide if anything needs to be done.
>

Are you saying that you will run the survey, and that if the results
say that GNOME needs more options (for example), you want use the
survey results to put pressure on upstream to add more options? "stop
ignoring the rest of the world, you've got a survey proving that a
vast majority of gnome users want more options, and you ignore them!"

Once again, I think things will go this way, we run the poll, maybe 1%
of gnome users answer, N% of these respondants answer X, and then
we'll get people saying "N% of GNOME users want X, upstream ignore
their users!"

Christophe