What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

Wed Oct 14 16:11:27 UTC 2009

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Larry Cafiero <larry.cafiero at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hey, all --
>>
>> I'm not sure I'm following this proposal correctly, so I may need a little
>> help. So maybe a little clarification might help, please.
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Marketing,
>>>
>>> One of the first things I see in order to help in marketing is the
>>> establishment of measurement systems. Measurement systems allow us
>>> internally to gauge how we are doing, and what needs to be improved. This is
>>> true also for the those viewing the community from an external standpoint.
>>> These measurements will provide us with more legitimacy and provide a
>>> platform where we are transparent about our results and that our results are
>>> measurable (and not some abstract way that no one can understand). I can
>>> see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_research that we have begun to
>>> start an formulate research that will be used to produce these statistics,
>>> but fail to see any methodologies that are used to base these questionnaires
>>> off of.
>>
>> OK, that's fine. I'm with you so far, until we get to here:
>>
>>> One thing I would like to start with to help all of you form a marketing
>>> mindset is to ask the question of "What happened in June of 2009 within the
>>> Fedora Project?
>>>
>>> As you can see: https://fedorahosted.org/fama/wiki/AmbassadorMetrics
>>> views that we have had a steady increase since measurement began in January
>>> of 2006. That is until June of 2009.
>>>
>>> Once we can answer this question, we can begin to answer these
>>> sub-questions:
>>>
>>> 1) Who were these ambassadors?
>>> 2) What specific contributor groups were they apart of?
>>> 3) Where did they go after they left the ambassador group?
>>
>> Joerg can probably help out here -- please do, Joerg -- but wasn't June
>> 2009 when we implemented the mentor program for Ambassadors? Before this
>> program, basically, the only requirement you needed to be a Fedora
>> Ambassador was that you had an e-mail address, a regular pulse and steady
>> breathing (although the breathing part didn't have to be steady, as long as
>> you were breathing). Now there's a more detailed process to follow, which
>> a.) scares off those who are not committed to Fedora and only want "free
>> stuff," and b.) allows us a to cultivate a better quality of Ambassador.
>>
>> As Joerg may have mentioned also, I believe around this time the
>> Ambassadors list was purged of non-participants. Messages were sent out and
>> those who did not respond (or responded that they were no longer interested)
>> were taken off.
>>
>> That could explain largely why numbers "dropped," providing a false
>> negative when you look at the numbers without applying the changes.
>>
>> I could be wrong about the timing of the mentor project's initiation, but
>> I would bet that's why numbers dropped.
>
>>>> This could very well be it (A change in the mentorship program). I am
>>>> just trying to get some answers that will give me some feedback to formulate
>>>> ideas from.
>>
>>> Please feels free to give me your comments and suggestions regarding this
>>> issue, so we can start to problem solve some issues to help us provide
>>> better and more improved results, as we do technically with every release.
>>
>> Unfortunately, I don't have as much time to participate in the marketing
>> group as I would like, but I'd be more interested in analyzing external
>> developments, like why did record numbers of people download Fedora 11 and
>> what are their experiences (good/bad/indifferent) and build a marketing
>> scenario around that, rather than use the time and effort to look internally
>> at how many people participate in Fedora and why.
>
>>>> Your internal situation always reflects your external situation. For
>>>> instance, if you are sad or not feeling good on the inside, other people
>>>> will see that and then respond to you accordingly. I agree that these
>>>> external experiences also need to be measured. There is a problem with
>>>> measuring downloads though, it does not give us a realistic number of how
>>>> many people actually use Fedora. It goes for the same ranking system
>>>> on http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity. These popularity
>>>> rankings are just based off of downloads and just give us data to reflect
>>>> just that: downloads.

This is a perpetual problem, not just for Fedora but for Linux in
general.  For the most part, Linux doesn't have the luxury of selling
licenses and thus the ability to produce a magic number of exactly how
many machines, or how many users, there actually are.  There is
actually, or at least was in the past, a project to try and tackle
this (and my brain is suffering from a lack of caffeine at the moment,
so I unfortunately can't remember what they are called offhand) -- but
the concept of asking users to have an automatic registration of their
server / pc with any sort of tracking authority just doesn't jive well
with the freedom lovers out there, myself included.  (Not to mention
it just invites the opportunity for people to automate a way to
register their PC 600 times a day, skewing the numbers.)

Now, some market research companies do take a stab at this (see
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications/Linux_in_New_Economy.pdf
.... page 3) - but from my understanding the non-paid part is a
formula of downloads to actual usage ratios, with some other magic
thrown, a little bit of backrubbing, and who knows what else.

All that said: yes, I would agree that knowing how many people are
actually using Fedora, vs. just downloading it, would be a fun
statistic to have.  But I'm not sure where that gets us.  Certainly,
it defines a market for us, assuming we could figure out our
percentage of share vs. other distributions, and gives us a goal to
strive for; it does not, however, define how we get from where we are
to where we want to be. And as Larry pointed out, asking our end-users
questions about their experiences (are you happy with X, Y, Z, on a
scale of 1 - 5, etc) is a Good Thing.  It allows us to (a) know our
strengths, which we should capitalize on, and continue to focus in
those areas and make sure that hard work continues to pay off, and (b)
know our weaknesses, so we can fill in those gaps.  Even if we can't
define just how big our user base is, or compare it size-wise with
other distributions, we can at least focus on making things greater;
if we know who are users are, we can cater to them better, and if we
know who are users are not, we can make decisions about whether or not
we want to go after them, what it would take.

$.02,

robyn
>>
>> Maybe I misunderstand your proposal, Gregory, but you asked for comments,
>> so here are mine.
>
>>>> Of course. I will always welcome your comments any all others too. Thank
>>>> you for them :)
>>
>> Larry Cafiero
>> Regional Ambassador, U.S. West Coast states
>> Fedora Project
>>
>>
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>
>
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