Re: [kde-artists] We need a Vision!

On Thursday, March 13, 2014 10:55:09 Björn Balazs wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 11. März 2014, 23:57:57 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> > On Tuesday, March 11, 2014 14:55:13 Björn Balazs wrote:

> impossible to reach them. We do have contact to all users - because we are
> delivering software to them.

Not really; we write software, but we rarely do the actual delivery. 

Others take that software, package it and deliver it to their end users with 
no interface to us. When I was traveling between events around the world 
promoting KDE (at one point, twice a month on average) I routinely ran into 
groups doing exactly this whom we had (and in many cases, continue to have) 
little to no contact with.

So people are using things we make, but there are middlemen between the end 
users and us with a disconnect between us and those middlemen. These same 
middlemen often change how the software is presented to suit their own ideas 
and the needs of their audience.

Is it possible to build a communication channel between our global user base 
and KDE? Perhaps, though I am skeptical given the nature of how software KDE 
writes gets into the hands of people. Assuming it is possible, it will take 
years to accomplish as it would mean working both with the various middlemen 
involved and likely putting new features into our software that will take 
years to reach our full audience. (Not everyone upgrades every release, or 
even annually ..)

Assuming we want a vision statement this year, I think one needs to be 
realistic about that.

> experiences. So we could e.g. ask what they associate with KDE or how KDE
> needs to turn in order to have their mother / girlfirend / ... use it. Then

The former question is valid, the latter question will get you noise. When 
asked a question, people will give an answer, regardless of whether they are 
in a position to do so with any factual basis or useful insight. This is the 
nature of surveying people (my wife does it for a living, as do many of our 
mutual friends .. it's an interesting, and difficult, thing to get useful 
information out of people by asking questions.)

What we could do is learn about the people who do use KDE and about those who 
we would like to use KDE. We'd still need to formulate a "how to get X to use 
KDE software.." based on that, however.

The surveying alone is a task that is likely to take the better part of a year 
to get useful results.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo

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