[kde-community] Results from the Mission Survey

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi,

thanks a lot for your efforts ! :-)

On Friday 29 July 2016 11:53:28 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> On 29.07.2016 08:57, Mirko Boehm - KDE wrote:
> > Hello Thomas,
> > 
> >> On 29 Jul 2016, at 01:04, Thomas Pfeiffer <thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org>
> >> wrote:
> >> 
> >> I'm sorry for taking so long with the survey analysis (analysis and
> >> documentation of survey results always end up taking longer than
> >> expected), but now finally I've prepared a presentation of the results
> >> of the first round of analysis of the survey I did for input on KDE's
> >> Mission statement. This is just plain results, no interpretation.
> >> I said "first round" because I'm ready to do perform further analyses if
> >> these results leave important questions open (if they can be answered
> >> from the data, of course). If you'd like me to dig deeper somewhere,
> >> feel free to tell me!
> > 
> > Excellent work, thanks. And there are some interesting insights already.
> > Besides minor differences, contributor and user interests are pretty much
> > aligned, for example. Or that we are good at retaining long-term
> > contributors.
> Yes, I found the alignment between user and contributor attitudes pretty
> striking as well. Pretty much the only area where there are bigger
> differences are priorities for target platfroms, but that might be a bit of
> a chicken and egg problem: Since we're currently mostly targeting Free
> OSes, our userbase uses mostly Free OSes, so that's what they care about.

Yes, probably.

How to interpret other results ?

E.g. "Importance of goals".
Do we consider the difference between 4.5 ("read as many users as possible" 
and "convince users to switch away from proprietary") and 5.5 ("do our part to 
promote Free...") as significant ?
If so, how does that fit together ? Could it be interpreted as that users of 
proprietary OS are not that important to us (3rd option), and we also don't 
want to make them switch to free OSs (5th option), while it is important for 
us to promote free software (4th option) ?

Actually I'm a bit surprised that "reach as many users as possible, regardless 
of which OS" got such a relatively low score, because to me this question 
translates to "do we want to provide (our part of) freedom to as many people 
as possible (even if they still use a proprietary OS kernel underneath) ?"
So it seems we don't want to.


One thing stands out quite clear: "provide stable and reliable software" got 
the highest points.

I'm a bit surprised that "aim for a presence on mobile devices" got a 
relatively low score. But that seems to match the (compared to GNU/Linux) low 
score for Android.

The even lower score for "embedded" confirms the impression I have in this 
regard from our community.

The relatively low result for "use new online services created by KDE" and the 
relatively low result for "offer our own web-based services" seem to fit 
together.

I find it noteworthy that we (developers, and even more users) consider the 
BSDs and even "Other Free OS" as more important target platforms than Windows.

The "How much do you agree.." page is a bit complicated.
I guess it means that we want to try to concentrate on "important" 
applications (so we cover the common needs of normal users), and that we 
should keep the focus on Qt.
The "focus on GUI" vs. "any useful software"... does that have to be 
considered also taking into account the relatively low score for web-based 
services ?

Alex, going on vacation now :-)