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Hi, Charles,

On 11/11/13 2:09 PM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
Hello Ken,


Ken Springer <snowshed1@q.com> a écrit :
Hi, Charles,

On 11/11/13 4:19 AM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
Hello Alex,

Le Mon, 11 Nov 2013 09:05:46 +0100,
Alex Thurgood <alex.thurgood@gmail.com> a écrit :

Le 10/11/2013 19:46, Charles-H. Schulz a écrit :

Hi Charles,

Whilst I appreciate the effort in designing such a survey and the
objective behind it, I too, must admit that the survey was not
worded
in a way in which I felt comfortable responding. Indeed, it seemed
to
be distinctly biased towards getting the participants to answer in a
given direction.

Next time I'm  sure you can join us in the weeks during which we
discussed the survey on the marketing and project's list :-)

I hope you are making a list of the concerns voiced in this thread, and

the other thread about the survey.  That will give you additional
points
to look at for the next survey.

Ken, I am not only making a list, I am reading this thread and the other one about LibreOffice vs. 
MSO with great attention.  Lots of stuff to digest but lots of things to say from my side as well.

Kudos, Charles. >

Additionally, I would question the statistical relevance of 600
responses, when the project is alleged to have tens/hundreds of
thousands of users. If only 600 hundred people took the time to
respond, what does this say about :

- penetration of the product;

I honestly would not  think there's relevant data for this in the
survey and from the respondents.

- reach of the survey;

Good question with no easy answer. The survey was localized in 5
languages aside English. The link was posted here and on the several
other users mailing lists. The word was spread on the Facebook
LibreOffice page and Google+ and to a lesser extent on Twitter.

Once I've said this I guess I didn't say much. Here are two
additional
facts:
- the survey was not translated (and not propagated) to three
countries
    where we know we have an active community and anywhere between a
non
    trivial number of users up to a large number of them: Russia,
Japan,
    Brazil. Judging by the survey results, it would seem that their
    impact has been minimal or virtually non-existent. So the survey
    reached out to some categories of users, but not all of them. I'd
be
    however confident in stating that the users that responded are
    representative of the LibreOffice users in general.

Let's work with Alex's comment there were 600 responses to the survey.
You often read how LO has thousands and thousands of users.  Just to
make it simple, let's say there's 100,000 users.  That's probably
miniscule to MSO and possibly even WordPerfect.

That means, at best you got the opinions of .6% of the users.
Personally, I would never consider that to be representative of the
user
base, especially when you noted in the next paragraph of the limitation

of the survey's distribution.  I would seriously consider junking this
survey's results, using it as a learning experience, and doing a better

survey.

Really, all you have is the opinions of the users of the mailing list,
not users in general.

You are right on your last statement however I still maintain that this fraction of users which is 
by the way even smaller than 0.6% is representative of the users in that the respondents have 
concerned that are similar to everyone else.

The only way to test that would be to redo the survey, and find a way to get it to all users.

One other point on the survey is that it did not pop out from my head. It was designed over the 
course of over a week by a team of contributors. And this team was open to anyone (hence my remark 
to Alex).

I didn't think it did. :-) But those situations often leave you in the position of "being to close to the trees to see the forest."


- the survey could have had a bigger and much deeper outreach if  it
    had been pushed directly to the users, say at the installation
phase
    or even through a mechanism allowing users to respond to it via
the
    StartCenter. That was obviously not the case, so in the end we
    reached out the users who are on the project's mailing list and
    connected to us through our social networks. This leaves out
plenty
    of users irrespective of their language.


- design of the survey;

What would you like to know? The survey was designed in order to be
progressive in its questioning as should be all the surveys. Beyond
that, don't look too much into survey methodologies, I'm not sure
they
are that sophisticated, unless of course you would like to get a
particular answer in advance, and that's precisely what  we wanted to
avoid.

As I and someone else pointed out, you limited the range of the
responses.  When you do that, you automatically color/bias the results
of any survey.  Easy to correlate the data received, but no guarantee
of
accuracy.  Which is why, so often, election results don't match the
polls and surveys.   :-)

Good point here too. I guess I will answer on the other thread but please always keep in mind that 
most of us are volunteers and that this is a FOSS project. It means among other things that we do 
not work like a company nor sell a product but also that we tend to be short handed when it comes 
to resources at least compared to Microsoft :-)

Best,

Charles.


- length and time for which the survey ran ?

The survey  started on the 31st of October and expired yesterday.

Best,

Charles.




Alex



--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 24.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.2.3


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