Survey to prepare 'Next Workspace Iteration' sprint

[Marco Martin]

On Monday 04 June 2012, Björn Balazs wrote:
> 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.

answers could tend to be more how they want their life or how they want to be 
seen as rather that the reality, it may be not completely useless tough

> 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.

completely agree that a cultural change like that is somewhat needed, and this 
survey is not useless in that regard, even tough probably of a somewhat 
limited help, we have to take that data as something informative, but 
something that has to be interpreted beyond what it seems to say (ie beyond 
what users think they need)

we should always remember that user led is never exactly a good approach
http://uxmag.com/articles/user-led-does-not-equal-user-centered

Cheers,
Marco Martin