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John,

Okay, that sounds different from what I initially understood. :-)
I thought you wanted to restart the survey. Anyway, thanks for the tip.
We'll take more care about phrasing what we want in the first place
next time. However, I suggest you read the archives  of our marketing
list during the month of October to see our discussions. 

Best,

Charles.


Le Tue, 12 Nov 2013 08:21:42 -0700,
John Meyer <john.l.meyer@gmail.com> a écrit :

Charles,

      What's expensive about setting up a mailing list dedicated to
the survey and asking internally "what do we want to know about users
and how do we want to find out about it"?  Or doing some requests for
volunteers from local university statistic students? Your volunteers
don't necessarily have to start from the community you are surveying
Professionalism is not about cost; it's about preparation.  And I
wouldn't recommend another survey.  At least, I wouldn't recommend it
yet.  If you don't have money, you do have time.  Take six months to a
year to get the right elements in place. In the meantime, use less
formal ways to explore what you want to know about users (feedback
forms, mailing lists, etc).



On 11/12/2013 8:02 AM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
John,

I'm well aware on how to run a project;  and many comments and
critiques I have read so far are valid. Just keep in mind that we're
not going to run just another survey because according to some, it
wasn't granular enough (btw: there are others who would object to
your methodology as being too expensive to organize or as
unncessary). Running the survey again would end up confusing the
users who already answered. 

If you seriously would like to get involved, you should  - I mean
it, there's no sarcasm. 

Best

Charles. 


Le Tue, 12 Nov 2013 07:54:15 -0700,
John Meyer <johnmeyer@pueblocomputing.com> a écrit :

Okay,  I point out problems and you're response is "you don't like
it you can run out your own survey" and then say I'm inaccurate
without stating why I'm inaccurate with a solicitation for
donations in the previous e-mail.  Do you see the major issue
here?  Flies, honey, vinegar.

I don't know how your project works, but if you're not doing the
proper work beforehand I don't know how it can work.  Ask anybody
who's run any successful project.  Heck, even the leaders of failed
projects can tell you.  They probably have more information.
First, you define your goals.  Next you gather and prepare your
resources.  You do a test run, maybe more than one and hope you
have enough time.  You have people with specific knowledge
critique and make adjustments.  Finally you run the project, and
afterwards you analyze and make improvements for the next time.
Those principals apply whether you're running a for profit project
or a non profit. And that would be the bare bones work if I was
running a local project. You're going global, which involves
understanding cultural differences as well.  That is not the type
of thing I would do with an ad hoc team with nobody who has any
experience in what I was doing in the first place. Like I said,
define the questions, gather the mailing list.  And if you don't
have access to anybody with experience in statistics, don't launch
until you do.  A badly done survey is worse than none at all.



On 11/12/2013 7:38 AM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
Le Tue, 12 Nov 2013 07:29:47 -0700,
John Meyer <johnmeyer@pueblocomputing.com> a écrit :

You made a survey without a survey statistician on your team.
Did you send out a request for such a person on the mailing
lists to advise you before you put together the survey?  Did you
have a clear and concise question that you wanted to answer
before you developed the survey questions?  Did you run the
questions by an aforementioned professional in the staff and
check for confirmation bias?


No. And apparently you have little awareness of how our project
works. But  you make a couple of valid points. 

I am not a professional statistician, and that's just what I
spotted.  I have covered surveys as a journalist in my previous
career, though.  And I also am a veteran of setting up business
projects.  A survey statistician would have a lot more to say I
am sure.  And we're not even starting on the analysis.  In fact,
I'd throw out the analysis and the results and start anew.
First off, define "users" (end users, evangelists, business
users?) and state the overall purpose of your survey in a single
question. I regret some of the tone of the previous e-mail
(first e-mail prior to coffee), but there's nothing here to work
with.  You've got 300 self-selected users with at least two
major questions in one survey that you did not break out by
region, sex, profession. You want results, you need good data
underneath.

You know, aside being rather inaccurate, you're welcome to run
another survey. We're always looking for more volunteers. And I'm
glad to help you on this, so please go ahead.

best,

Charles. 



On 11/12/2013 7:04 AM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
Le Tue, 12 Nov 2013 06:57:20 -0700,
John Meyer <johnmeyer@pueblocomputing.com> a écrit :

On 11/10/2013 11:46 AM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
Hello,

As there were some exchanges about the survey here and as I
advertised it on this mailing list as well, I thought you
might be interested by my initial analysis:
http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2013/11/10/users-the-final-frontier/

Thank you for your participation!



1.  The survey seems to be a Self seLected Opinion Poll (SLOP),
so I'm taking it with a grain of salt the size of the Sears
Tower. There's no margin of error included in the poll either
and based upon the sample as being from the mailing lists
(where people are generally active anyway) I'd say it's fairly
skewed. 2.  The conclusions are generic, wishy-washy and are
based on guesses and assumptions with no hard underlying
data.  How much in contributions has LibreOffice raised?  Does
that fit in with what the survey said? Where is the Quality
Assurance in the web site? And why would an end user be
interested in that? 3.  User support and quality assurance do
not require too much time or technical knowledge.  Remind me
not to hire you for either of those tasks in my business.
Those are things that professional companies hire entire other
companies to do.

I'd give this project an F in a freshman statistics class, and
would not base any strategy off of this "survey"


Thanks John, I'll take it  from your comment that
 1) you are either a survey professional and you only wait for
the next survey to contribute your time designing it

and/or 

 2) you will contribute the costs of hiring a market research
firm the next time we need a survey. 

Allegedly, I and none of the other people who designed the
survey are professional survey designers. 

Best,
















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