Survey to prepare 'Next Workspace Iteration' sprint

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, June 4, 2012 23:57:22 Björn Balazs wrote:
> 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.

and having done this for more than a few years, i'm telling you that these 
people tend not to have a good idea about that exact set of questions.

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

i understand that and appreciate the motivation. it's not a good way to go 
about it however.

> 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 don't think you understood my email. i also think you are judging the 
knowledge and skills of someone you don't know. be careful with that. you seem 
to be assuming things about my background, experience and knowledge ... and 
those assumptions seem to be pretty wide of the mark.

so ...

when we ask "What is your personal biggest wish for the future of KDE?" (the 
very first question on the survey) that is asking for people to come up with 
what they want and they will perceive that as offering solutions. there is also 
an implicit promise in return, in their minds, because they are spending time 
(giving it to us) to fill this out .. if we don't act on it, then why did we 
ask?

there are three key ingredients that influence the results:

* the survey (which are extremely hard to get right; my wife does this for a 
living and i've had the opportunity to hear all sorts of fun and funny stories 
on this topic)

* the audience

* the interpreters

this kind of survey can not be thrown together quickly and get good results. 
especially not by someone who is new to this area of interest, as you're 
learning the topic your trying to research in tandem. bad survey results => 
bad project decisions. the questions in the survey, as is, are really poor 
quality and that is almost entirely because it has been written by someone who 
does not understand that which they are asking for input on.

the audience is also very particular in this case. we will not reach our 
entire user base, only a very select subset of them who are rather different 
than our overall user base. and these people have some very interesting and 
reliable traits, such as how they read implied promises into things. i know 
this from experience with them. and i don't want to spend the next 2 years 
after this little event having to deal with "KDE developers don't listen to 
users". i've been there, done that, please do not put me back there again.

the third ingredient, the interpreters .. that's us. and right now we're a 
group of people with varying experience and a difference in levels of team 
integration. it will be very hard to work on an interpretation of external 
data together until we sort out a few of our own topics first.

> 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

that's a fine idea; this kind of survey is not how to do it.

> 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?

because it will do harm. i've explained why in my last email. perhaps you can 
read it again and if you have questions about specific points i made, instead 
of dismissing them wholesale, you could inquire and we could hold a dialog on 
them.

as it stand right now, this survery is not appropriate and i do not want to 
see it going out. i'm saying that as the maintainer of this project and 
someone who has been providing effective leadership for it for the last several 
years. i ask you to respect that.

> 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).

i already did pass a veto with my last email.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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