"Automatic Info Reporting" BoF summary

[Mario Fux]

Am Samstag, 27. September 2014, 22.05:03 schrieb Thomas Lübking:

Morning Thomas

> >>> - Ask user about their email address (stored separately of course) so
> >>> we can contact them! Ask if they are interested in something special
> >>> (quarter mails, new app version information, fundraiser, events in the
> >>> neighbourhood, other KDE people near them, etc. pp.)
> >> 
> >> That can be done in the kcm as extra opt-in, we don't want to present a
> >> scary dialog on first boot, otherwise people will just run away.
> > 
> > That's just my humble opinion but honestly I think contact
> > information to our
> > users is much more valueable than any other data.
> 
> I guess they'll have a similar opinion - and therefore be rather reluctant
> to give it away (to not be spammed by KDE or have their contact data in
> one more database to be leaked from) - or they give you "me at mail.com"
> (poor fellow who actually has this addy ;-)

That's the pessimistic view. I (and yes, my personal opinion ;-) only want the 
email address of the people that are interested in what we're doing and about 
news of the software they use. For a lot of people there is no such 
possibility atm. There are the people that are really interested in free 
software and some of the technical stuff behind it and they have mailing 
lists, the forum, the dot etc. but I think there are people that "just" want 
to use our great software (ok, the great software you guys make, I'm not 
coding much atm ;-) and want to know if there are new versions, new features 
etc. They don't want to visit some web page every now and then and they are 
quite fine to get some news about this and they might be even fine to get some 
information every other half a year or year about a fundraiser for their 
software.

And I'm not mainly thinking about user of our software on Linux or other 
Unixes but more and more about people that (will) use our software on Mac, 
Android and Windows (that don't know the nice way of having a package manager 
or distribution ;-).

I just think that we really miss a connection to our users (the people that 
just use our software and don't want to know how it works. They just want to 
get work done, sometimes a new feature, nice if some bugs are fixed and they 
like it that much and see it as a great value that they would give back 
something like money or sharing a link if they just new that we need this 
support and that we exists and what we are).

> If the intention is to have a default pushnews service, i'd propose a
> default plamoid that displays the "dot.kde.org" rss feed or something
> similar which is far more defensive than asking them for their mail
> address.

I think I wrote above why I think the dot is not the best thing for some of 
our users (and I love the dot and write myself for it quite often). And 
another thing is that I want to reach people as well that don't use Plasma, 
that don't work with Linux (or don't know what the Linux is that they are 
using) but that just use Kdenlive on Mac for their video editing and that love 
it and that just use Digikam on Windows for their holiday pictures or that 
just use KMyMoney and want to spend some of their millions on a Swiss bank 
account ;-).

> Cheers,
> Thomas

griits
Mario