Informal polls amongst ubuntu members/developers ?

Toby Smithe toby.smithe at gmail.com
Mon Nov 27 18:05:45 GMT 2006


Hmm... I somewhat disagree. Whilst it may be difficult to set up these
programs (and it really isn't), one who cares enough will manage. I did.
I knew nothing about VoIP or Gobby until MTV, and although I am UTC, not
UTC-8, I managed to contribute by staying up late. I had also to debug
VoIP myself, as there was no kind of connection attempt at the server.
Turns out my router was blocking the connection. Again, this is
something I was one hundred percent new to. Nevertheless, I was
dedicated, and persevered. I wanted my say. I had my say. You could have
too. ;)

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 04:51 -0500, t u wrote:
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> Oliver Grawert wrote:
> > well, preferably people would participate in the sessions at the
> > conferences, there are VOIP options, the specs get edited publicly in
> > gobby etc, so its very easy to take part (and thanks to gobby to even
> > write your own parts in specs from home).
> 
> Hi,
> 
> This is now mentioned a number of times as an argument, and I have to
> disagree with this point of view. It isn't that easy to be part of the
> decision making for regular users:
> 
> The specs are not well announced and they usually end up being pretty
> complex creatures nearing towards being approved. You have to either
> have to catch it before getting more or less reviewed, or to read a
> whole wiki page and no one likes reading too much :)
> 
> VOIP and gobby aren't good options for participation as the user will
> need to tweak around, learn new stuff, spend time etc. I, for one, just
> couldn't figure out how to monitor UDS straight forward, so I didn't
> pursue -this is what a regular joe/jane would do as well :) And believe
> me, I'm one dedicated regular user ;)
> 
> The process of letting the end-user involved in decision-making needs to
> be simple -as simple as possible. That is why I have to disagree with
> this common argument that "there already are ways for people to join our
> decision-making process".
> 
> I think the forum-ambassador spec and the poll idea are very
> constructive. The end-user shouldn't need to do much stuff, nor should
> s/he need to learn new software or spend more time than absolutely
> needed of her/him.
> 
> Here's an example: the winmodem spec that I have been trying to promote
> obsessive-compulsively :) It has two components:
> 
> 1. launchpad spec, mainly for developers and more experienced users
> 2. ubuntuforums poll, implemented before the spec, for anyone else to
> vote and to voice their concerns
> 
> - From the end-user's perspective, it is very easy to provide feedback:
> read a few lines of description and then vote if you're interested.
> You'll be done within minutes.
> 
> - From the developers' point of view, when you look at that spec, you will
> know instantly and almost for sure[*] whether the community wants it or
> not: in this example, 69.28% of 778 users *absolutely* want this while
> only 5.14% of the users *absolutely* don't want this. So deciding on
> whether to review or to just reject it is pretty easy (as far as
> userbase / PR is concerned).
> 
> Spec: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/winmodem-support
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> [*] Not for sure = Statistically not feasible
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