[kde-community] Please participate in our survey for input on KDE's Mission

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 28.06.2016 23:50, Sven Brauch wrote:
> On 28/06/16 23:16, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
>> It looks like especially WikiToLearn, but also Applications are a bit
>> underrepresented compared to how many people are contributing to them overall.
>>
>> I'm now also sending this to the wikitolearn mailing list (yes, I should have
>> done that before) and hope that we'll get more community members to participate
>> in the survey, especially (but not only) applications and WtL contributors.
> Not exactly what a statistican would call a "randomly sampled poll"
> though. ;)
>
> I trust you are aware of the biasing the amount of participants from the
> different areas introduces and aim to provide the results of the poll in
> a form which is transparent with respect to this bias.
>
Actually, the goal in this case would not be a random sample, but a full census,
which unfortunately won't be possible, though.

A truly random sample is not possible either, however, because the overall 
population
is too small for random sampling to work properly and the participation was 
self-selected.
Neither is a stratified sample, because we don't even know the size of either 
the complete
population nor the sub-groups.

Note that "Invite everyone and see who participates" is not random sampling, either.
It is biased by who decides to participate, but also by who actually receives 
the invitation.
For WikiToLearn, for example, the problem is that many of them are probably not
subscribed to any of the lists I sent the original invitation to (although it 
would be great
if all of them could subscribe to kde-community), which introduces a bias by itself.

The only true random sampling would be if I had a list of _everyone_ in the 
community,
would select a sample at random from that, and then _forced_ everyone in the sample
to participate and not allowed anyone else to do so.

Therefore, a statistically valid survey is not possible in this case. Which is 
not too big a
problem, however, because we're not doing market or scientific research here.
The only purpose of this survey was to get input from more than the handful of 
people
who had been discussing on the mailing list get a feeling for what the majority 
might think.

The survey is not binding in any way. In the end, it will be the same as always 
in KDE: Who does
the work, decides. I just wanted us to decide based on more than our own personal
opinions.

Of course I will offer an analysis split by the contribution areas. However, 11 
people are
a very small sample, and we could do much better there given the size of the WtL
community.

The sub-sample for Applications is clearly big enough to do statistics on them,
it just felt to me that there must be far more people contributing to KDE 
applications than
took the survey so far, so I wanted to invite them specifically as well.

I hope this clarified things a bit.
Cheers,
Thomas