[Mageia-dev] What do you think about create a Mageia Welcome Center?

[Michael Scherer]

Le jeudi 30 septembre 2010 à 14:53 +0300, atilla ontas a écrit :
> 2010/9/30 Wolfgang Bornath <molch.b at googlemail.com>:
> > Agreed. Surveys are a nuisance anyway.
> > 1. A large part of survey participants do not tell the truth.
> > 2. A large part of users do not participate so you will not get any
> > real information anyway.
> > 3. If something is wrong with the project, the distribution, user
> > satisfaction or whatever you will know it by user postings in the
> > forums earlier than by surveys.
> >
> > So, at the end of the day,
> > What do you get by surveys to take away?
> > More work to implement and to read them, that's all.
> I mean what wobo has written. Besides, forum posts are more effective
> way to track users opinions about distro and applications. 

Well, this depend on the question. 

A survey could simply give data about "do you use it in professional
environment" or not, and therefor see where people use the distribution,
and where they don't use and try to do some effort to fix problem in the
area where they don't use. This could also help to decide on the type of
features that must be prioritized. 
As I said, that's (imho) also listening to community to know this.

This can also help to get information about country, ie, if we see there
is almost no user in some country, is there a reason, should we try to
help the community there ?


> I always
> hated this survey thing on Mandriva. Also it feels something like a
> registration to a propierty application or validate a windows install.
> Many users in Mandriva Turkiye community asked me if they *must* fill
> survey and register their e-mails. Most of them were new to GNU Linux.

For sure, if such survey is used ( and again, that's just a
possibility ), we will have to keep in mind that it  must be clearer on
the survey what it the goal, and it must be clear that most people do
not see it is optional.  

I do not advocate to have it by default and forcing user, but I think
that restricting feedback to forum will miss lots of people. And the
lack of feedback was something people were complaining for at Mandriva.

There is a balance between waiting that people come with us, and
potentially lose some without knowing why, or asking to everybody, and
basically annoy people because we asked feedback. And that's not easy to
find the right spot.

> I think we should decide if we will implement a Welcome Center/Kaptan
> to distro and if it is an informative screen or basic configuration
> tool or both for newbies. I' m not interested in filling the blanks on
> a survey. Also a survey would be introduced in main web site. Any
> interested user should fill it.

Such survey on computer side could also help to get data about hardware.
For example, I think kernel developers would love to have a list of
people who are registered testers, with their hardware, to contact them
to say "here is a bug, but I do not have the hardware, I think this rpm
can fix it, can you give me feedback".

This would solve the future problem of hardware QA, because while
Mandriva had a labs with lots of stuff, we don't.

But this requires that people register, ie give their email and their
hardware data. And I think it will be more maybe more effective to ask
at install time than to wait for people to register by themselves each
computer. But of course, this can be seen as too intrusive so great care
must be taken.

-- 
Michael Scherer