Re: Initial survey discussions

[Simon Waldman <swaldman@bigfoot.com>]

First of all, arma: Can you get majordomo to add a reply-to line
pointing to the list? I almost sent this to you personally my mistake.


> I think that one big problem is that
> people don't care or even know so much about OSs but applications!
> It is difficult to get knowledge what people wanted in an OS, because they
> don't so much realize the whole thing...
>

THe sign of good cinematography or video editing is that you don't
notice it. The same is true, IMO, of OSs This may cause seul in general
a problem: How do you explain to somebody that linux is a different OS
if they don't know what an OS is? I know a number of people who think of
Win95 as 'the computer'. But that's probably off-topic for this list.


>  The problem with any
> "voluntary response" type survey is that you'll find your results are
> skewed toward the interests/opinions of people most inclined to
> respond.
>
This is very true, but I'm not sure it's actually much of a problem for
us. ANY people not currently using linux who start using it is good, so
as long as the responses are from non-linux users they're useful - it
doesn't really matter if they're not from a representative sample
(althought that would be nice).


> But that presents a much more difficult problem of survey distribution --
> it's really tough to get the survey to the end-users themselves, since they
> don't live on newsgroups and monitor mailing lists.
>
This will present more of a problem for getting peoiple to use an actual
distro. For the survey, if everyone on the seul lists were to persuade a
few non-linux people they know to fill it in, there would be loadsa
responses. And without thinking about it too much, probably a fair
cross-section, with one important exception: an online survey
(presumably the only kind we can do without lots of money) will only
reach those with net access!!!

> Otherwise you end up writing your own parsing code for
> the CGI or response-mailer data you get.  This is my current headache
> (I'm trying to learn Perl by doing this project).
>
Somebody write the CGI, and I'll do the web page to front it...(me, take
the easy job? nah...)

--

--
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Simon Waldman            email:  swaldman@bigfoot.com
Surrey, England.                 swaldman@seul.org
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SEUL : Simple End-User Linux     http://www.seul.org
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"We're sending 23 million leaflets to every household in Britain".
                -Norman Fowler, British Health Secretary, 1986.