Notes related to LikeBack / KFeedbackWizard: KDE4-wide feedback tool [long]

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

Hello,
Nice to see such well crafted tool as LikeBack.

I recall there's also KFeedbackWizard - 
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=20360 -delivered by Christian 
Nitschkowski, my former coworker in the Kexi team. We planned to use it at 
least for KOffice by default, but the idea needed some discussion and 
polishing, so now it's delayed for 2.x.

I think it's valuable to get *more* info from users, and more fine-grained. 
Someone calls this as spyware, but as FOSS users are getting the software 
freely and _most_ of them are unable to "pay" for it even with bug reports - 
there is data that can be obtained without consuming their time (thanks to a 
machinery working in the background):

- every application's startup (can track use cases for the new forthcoming K 
menu / Plasma UI)
- startup times
- activities like a selected sequences of actions, frequency of such actions
- crashes (backtraces reported always automatically after one initial agreement)
- system info (higher level of "spying") but also valuable, e.g. we can know 
whether 64bit hardware is popular and what distributions are used and how well 
the stuff is packaged (distr-specific crashes, yes!) --this is exactly what 
pages of KFeedbackWizard contained

All this KDE-wide, usually not app-specific. There are usability-related 
things tracked as well as things allowing to make beter technical decissions 
(e.g. amount of RAM). What I also found valuable: the statistics are better 
than nothing if we're trying to answer on elementary marketing question: how 
is our user base looks like.

The the statistics are usable _even_ if biased because only these people will 
be included in the charts:
1) people that are online, at least for a while, and
2) people that value KDE as a project and *trust* it (and trust the distro maker)

We can of course ask our users to enable the feedback machinery on the dot 
from time to time and on any KDE / FOSS related web sited and related 
conferences. As long as the tool is not intrusive (i.e. the question is 
poppuing up once the KDE/distro is installed (hopefully in the welcome 
screen), I don't think people will be annoyed.

Related TODO could be to make KDE users aware as soon as possible that 
enabling the "feedback" option is in their very interest.

PS: Surprisingly, MS Office vendor added such a feedback tool even in Office 
2003... and MS found this valuable (so the "community effort" worked even when 
this is a closed source product)

PS2: It would be nice to have the functionality *always* enabled in KDE and 
recommend for the distro makers *to keep* it. (yes, it's hard in a mixed 
GNOME+KDE environment, like Novell's one - to solve that, maybe there should 
be a common tool developed.. uuh things are getting complicated)

Where to start? After pros and cons are discussed, I'd like to propose pasting 
the results to the KDE wiki as a TODO.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
  Kexi & KOffice: http://www.kexi-project.org, http://www.koffice.org
  KDE3 & KDE4 Libraries for MS Windows: http://kdelibs.com, http://www.kde.org