GSOC Idea: Calligra service plugin for user survey framework

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

Hello Celeste, Jonathan, Matt,

Yes I cannot refuse mentoring or co-mentoring.
As Boemann has mentioned I'm pushing a small user feedback module into
Kexi (good news: for Kexi 2.4) [1].
It is an incremental work using my limited resources: at this step it
is a fully automated feedback.

If user enables this feature, operating system name and version, Kexi,
KDE version, regional settings and display
parameters are transferred (in the background) to a server anonymously
on every execution of Kexi. Public statistics shall be computed based
on that. Optionally user can mark her account as unique what further
helps in statistics. This step is aimed at minimizing the need for
manual work.

Why I invested into that area is first and foremost because users can
be seen as participants in the development process.

One of the ways to continue could be indeed to expand into directions
you described. From the very beginning I planned to offer collecting
the feedback data related to usability like frequency of and context
of executed commands. I know most of that is all nothing new (some
info and links: [2]), but integration within a native app and
availability programming interfaces was not easily available before.
Moreover, in my opinion the percentage users providing good feedback
in open source is surprisingly small compared to the potential.

Everything I have so far is only loosely related to Kexi specifics, so
any application could eventually benefit.
I will be grateful for professional advice on methods or guidelines of
collecting the usability feedback, like building surveys.

[1] http://kexi-project.org/pics/2.4/rc1/kexi-2.4-status-pane.png
[2] http://community.kde.org/Calligra/Meetings/Fall_2011_meeting/Minutes#Idea:_User_feedback_module

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)