Survey to prepare 'Next Workspace Iteration' sprint

[Björn Balazs]

Aaron, all,

thanks for your mail. It is good to adress these kinds of worries directly - 
and before the survey gets started. I actually get confronted with them often 
in my work. 

I personally think we do not need to worry. In most projects I worked with, 
people tend to agree with me at latest at the end of the project ;)

Let me explain a bit - I hope you put the worries aside as well:

We are not asking people how to build the bridge in terms of e.g. static 
calculations. These have to be done by an engineer. No discussion about this.

What I try to do with this survey, is to ask users / the community to report 
about their life - or to stay in the picture: let them imagine where the 
bridge could be built and how the existence of the bridge would change their 
life. 

By this, the only thing we do is looking for inspiration as input for our 
sprint.

Most of what you say about how good products are developed is right. Just your 
preassumptions are wrong. We are not asking users to code, neither to provide 
solutions, nor do we promise to do anything... It really has the simple task 
of getting inspired.

(I have actually changed the first page a bit, to more actively adress, that 
we do not promise anything).

There are of course superior techniques to understand users (you mention 
observation) - but we are simply not in the position to do this right now - 
and there also surely is room for improvement in this survey. I would love to 
take some more time to let it mature more - but I am sure that the inspiration 
we get from it, will benefit the results of the sprint - so I personally think 
it is ok to start it now as it is. 

Another aspect is, that I think it is most important to involve as many people 
as possible into the development of (Free) Software Products. This will lead 
to better products, more (loyal) users, more advertising and more volunteers 
that participate, e.g. in bug triaging or translation. People will identify 
with a product they feel they have influenced - they will get a feeling of 
self efficacy. Of course this will not be the result of a one-time survey, but 
gathering experiences with this kind of approach might bring us into the 
situation of a cultural change in KDE, that is less developer-centric and more 
focussed on the users.

That said, I hope you will agree, that we might not benefit from this survey, 
but we will surely not do any harm by starting the survey. So why not take the 
chance?

As time progresses and we need some time to run the study, I will delay the 
start a bit. If anyone still feels uncomfortable with it, I would ask to 
actually post a 'veto' with the next 18 hours (that would be 18:00 in CEST). 
If there is none, I will start the study and post it on the planet. Hope this 
ok for everyone.

Of course, I am more than happy about any suggestion for an improvement of the 
survey. Personnally I hope I find some time tomorrow to look at it again.

Cheers,
Björn


Am Montag, 4. Juni 2012, 20:17:27 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Sunday, June 3, 2012 19:25:05 Björn Balazs wrote:
> > I have tried to build upon the vision formulated by Aaron. Target audience
> 
> these are the emails i really struggle with writing.
> 
> on the one hand, i'm really excited that people have the enthusiasm to do
> this kind of work and are putting the effort in to make it happen. i don't
> want to blunt that one bit. in fact, i want to encourage it.
> 
> on the other hand, i'm confident that this approach will result in a train
> wreck.
> 
> so i'm suck in a position where i want to encourage the motivation but
> discourage the application of it. it is hard to do both at the same time,
> and i hope i don't screw it up completely :)
> 
> so ... why do i think this will be a train wreck?
> 
> for the same reason i should never, ever be asked by the engineer
> responsible for building a new bridge in my city how i think it should be
> built. i don't know. it isn't my area of expertise. i'll come up with
> SOMETHING for them if they really want me to, but my answer is going to be
> pretty naive. there is no way i can do better because i lack both the
> training and that data needed to formulate great input.
> 
> that describes 99.9% of our users when it comes to these kinds of questions.
> 
> over the years i've found that when i observe, for instance, that people
> have lots of files many will say "no i don't." then i walk them through all
> the files they have: emails, music, video, pictures they took with their
> camera and/or phone, bookmarks, ebooks, work/school docs ... it's usually
> pretty fun to actually tally it up with them because most people do not
> realize the extent of their data.
> 
> and that's the easiest and most obvious part of the sentence "I have huge
> number of files, devices, people I know, network services I use and I use my
> computer for multiple and very different tasks (e.g. work, entertainment,
> personal communication, school)."
> 
> 
> next: when you ask someone what they want, if you don't deliver it, you will
> disappoint them. so this survey is askking for ideas that are probably
> unworkable while simultaneously setting up our most ardent users for
> disappointment all at once. :/
> 
> 
> it gets better though: someone may want the best twitter+facebook platform
> EVARRR!!!!111!! but that may simply not turn us on as developers. we may
> find that maybe 1 or 2 of us will work on it. and maybe they won't even
> understand why the "best twitter+facebook platform evar" is useful or
> important, they just do it for their love of our users.
> 
> the result will be flat, uninspired and probably not as good as if they were
> making something with a philosophy they understood.
> 
> the opposite direction is a lot easier: formulate a vision, understand it,
> know it, breath it, love it ... our users will too.
> 
> so IMHO and IME this is going about it in exactly the opposite direction if
> we want a great chance at good results.
> 
> 
> in a phrase:
> 
> 					this is not how to do it.
> 
> the upcoming sprint needs to, must be, driven by people who will be involved
> in making the solutions and who understand the challenges intimately and
> with a reasonable degree of topic appropriate competence.
> 
> so before we go and create problems for a project i've put a number of years
> into and am now trying to turn into a day job for myself and others ..
> let's discuss HOW to get the information we want before we start
> implementing such methods.
> 
> an even better starting point might be to discuss WHAT information we need.
> 
> or .. we could wait until the sprint starts. i can do a bit of an
> orientation via a google hangout with the attendees to point things in a
> reasonable direction. this is what we have done for the last 3 years, and
> tokamaks have been remarkably productive.
> 
> 
> 
> p.s. and why isn't this "Tokamak 5" and instead morphed into the nebulous
> "Next Workspace Iteration Sprint" which does nothing to build on the
> community platform we have going here, alienating just about everyone
> because it is neither known (and therefore comfortable) nor well defined
> (literally it means: we're doing something next .. iteratively .. in the
> workspace .. but what exactly?)
-- 
Dipl.-Psych. Björn Balazs
Business Management & Research
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