Marketing research

This page has been created to foster discussion on the use of Market Research by the Fedora Marketing team. Please contribute to the discussion!

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Goals

• Develop and distribute meaningful, relevant market research materials that can be used to enhance Fedora quality and distribution.
• Work with community projects to develop end-user surveys in the interest of helping those projects improve planning and quality.

Infrastructure

Fedora Marketing is planning on using limesurvey as the surveying software. For our first survey, the FUDCon Toronto 2009 survey, we used limeservice in the interest of getting the survey out the door before people forgot what happened at FUDCon.

Infrastructure Status

Please see Things to do to finish Limesurvey for everything; major tickets below.

• bug 508817 - Review Request: Limesurvey - An open source survey application
• bug 549590 - Review Request: pChart - A PHP class to build charts.
• bug 549604 - Review Request: domxml-php4-php5 - XML transition from PHP4 domxml to PHP5 dom module
• bug 544821 - Review Request: php-gettext - Gettext emulation in php
• Current testing instructions - How_to_set_up_a_limesurvey_sandbox

Surveys

Completed

FUDCon Toronto 2009 Survey

• Survey ran December 16, 2009 through January 8, 2010
• URL was: http://fedoraproject.limequery.org/index.php?sid=34266&lang=en
• Questions List at FUDCon_survey
• Survey Results (draft), including comments: File:FUDCon-2009-survey-draft.odp
• Custom slice: File:Remoteusers.pdf Opinions of FUDCon Live by remote users ONLY (6 respondents)

Previous FUDCon Surveys

• Marketing/Surveys/FUDConF9

Other

• Marketing_surveys page has some other past (as in, wayyyy in the past) research results.

Upcoming Surveys

This section includes brainstorms on questions for upcoming surveys.

The next survey Fedora Marketing will be conducting will be a general Fedora Community Poll on general improvements. This will go out after we have limesurvey up and running on fp.o infrastructure.

General Improvements Survey - Fedora Community Poll

1. Describe your primary role in the Fedora project. (Developer, Tester, Documentation Writer, End User/Fedora Deployment, Translation or other internationalization, Other/None of the above)
2. If other, plz. describe
3. How long have you been involved with Fedora?
4. How many bugzillas have you entered? (None, 1-10, 11-25, 26-60, More than 50)
5. Please sort the items in this list in priority order based on what you suggest is the most important area for Red Hat to focus on in order to make improvements in Fedora. Survey tool instructions: 1 is top priority, 12 is lowest. You can select each column only once. ie, you can only designate a single item as priority 1. Skip any items you think are not in need of improvement. (Provide free CDs, infrastructure enhancements to improve development of Fedora extras packages, infrastructure to enable non-RH people to directly check in changes to Fedora Core packages, Reduce the number of packages in FC by moving more to extras, focus on implementing new features in the core Fedora distro, increased visibility into FC development schedules and status, improve bugzilla responsiveness, single CD install, improve docs and release notes, improve overall stability of FC, internationalization - add more languages and improve input methods, increase participation as reviewers for Fedora extras.)
6. Please rate your opinions on Fedora *Core's* (not Extras) performance in the following areas. For questions that you haven't had experience with, or do not have a strong opinion on, please do not specify a response. (Overall quality, system performance / responsiveness, timeliness / delivery on schedule, ease of use, documentation, download infrastructure, availability of free CDs, appropriate placement of packages in core vs. extras, development infrastructure - developers only pls, bug reporting infrastructure - bug reporters only pls, bug report responsiveness - bug reporters only pls)
7. How frequently should Fedora Core releases occur? (More frequently than 6 months, every 6 months, every 9 months, once per year, less than once per year)
8. Please rate your opinions on Fedora *Extras'* (NOT core) performance in the following areas. (Overall quality, completeness/diversity of packages, ease of obtaining developer sponsorship - contributing developers only pls, responsiveness of reviewer comments - contributing developers only pls)
9. How do you think Fedora is doing overall - please rate your opinions in the following areas. (Fedora is a healthy and growing initiative, Fedora is doing better than other community distros at meeting the participant's needs, Red Hat is doing a good job of balancing the needs of the community, Redhat has been receptive to input on how to best conduct Fedora, Fedora is doing the right thing by not including packages with suspected legal issue - ie various audio and video decoders / players)

End-User Survey

The target for this survey will be to reach out to end-users beyond the scope of the Fedora community, with the end-goal of figuring out how to convert more users to Fedora.

• End User Survey Questions

Helping Fedora software project maintainers / participants do research specific to their projects

Goal: Assist project maintainers / participants out with market sizing, developing user / developer surveys specific to their projects, helping them tie results to benchmarking, project planning, etc.

We're looking for projects who want to do end-user research! Please send an email to the Fedora Marketing mailing list, fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com and let us know how we can help you out.

FUDCon 2009 +1 Survey

These are some potential Fedora Live questions for the following FUDCon survey. Where applicable use questions from the previous survey. Using consistent questions means we can monitor trends. The following changes and additions are to monitor changes we have made based on previous survey results.

We are looking for the following goals:

• Let's see more usage
• Let's see a higher number of remote participants
• Let's see more interaction?

New questions

• On the following survey, make sure to ask how useful each technology used in FUDCon Live was to the participants
  • How useful 1-10
  • Would you like to see it again? 1-10
  • Would you like to see something better? Open Text Field
  • Were there any issues while using it? (What happens here if bandwidth at the facility is terribad, how does that impact survey results on fudcon live?)
    • We should host on site servers that are autonomous or can be synced and slaved to others in Fedora Infra, so local attendees can get better performance while remote attendees can join in too. If possible, stress tests should be done on site ahead of time, so we should document this for the local crew. Obviously if there are issues, that have a meaningful effect, this survey should pick up in it, namely a slow gobby server might not be the end of the world if no one notices.
• Did you watch any live streams during the event, how useful were they? N/A or 1-10
• Are you going to watch recordings after the event, how important is this? N/P or 1-10
• Are there any streams that you wanted to see that were not recorded? Which ones? Open text field
  • I want to track the opinion of this over time, it might be important now, but not so much in 5 years, and having this over time will tell us if there is a decline in interest
• Rate documentation (1-5)
• Were you aware of FUDCon Live?
  • Did you use it onsite? Remote? After the event?
• If you ran a session, was it useful to communicate with remote participants?
• If you ran a session, did you find it easy to communicate with remote participants?
• If you participated in Fedora Live, did you use it passively or did you also use it to interact?

Next Steps

Not necessarily in order of importance...

• Get feedback from the various subgroups in Fedora as to whether market research would be useful to them, and if so, what kinds of research they would like to see, and open the floor for suggestions on types of research, specific questions people would like answered, etc.
• Prioritize what types of research would get the biggest bang for the effort in the near term.
• Develop a schedule, most likely in sync with the wider Fedora development cycle, for delivering research in a timely manner so that it can be used by various groups for development, distribution, etc.
• Determine the best way to educate research "consumers" on how to best apply it to what they are doing.
• Determine if research can / should be used to provide benchmarks, or show improvements made in accordance with survey feedback (ie: "80% of top requested improvements were made!"). Customer satisfaction, if you will.

Resources

• ESOMAR guidelines on market research ethics

Questions to Answer

1. What questions do we want answered by market research - and how will we incorporate the feedback we get back into the development cycle?
   • Good questions; I don't have a good short answer right now, and think this will take some time to discuss with both the marketing and development teams - is this something we can ramp up on slowly between now and the end of November, and kick off for real during the F13 cycle? What do other people think? Mel Chua 21:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
2. Is there a budget for market research?
   • Not from the Fedora coffers. I could imagine getting groups (classes, companies, etc) with budget to do this kind of work for themselves to make their work available and useful to us, though. Mel Chua 21:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
3. Is there a simple open-source tool for developing surveys to be posted and aggregating the answers?
   • Yes! I know several people within Fedora have been looking at http://www.limesurvey.org/ for just that reason. Mel Chua 21:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
4. Could we get companies to donate free swag (tee-shirts, netbooks, mp3 players, messenger bags, etc.) to provide as an incentive for completing surveys?
   • Possibly, but I'd rather have non-swag incentives when possible, since research has shown that swag is actually demotivating in the long term. We should brainstorm ways to make these surveys give value back to the people who fill them out. Or I may be overly idealistic and we really do just need some swag. Mel Chua 21:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
   • I prefer that we use digital swags such as wallpapers and screen savers. For example we create a new wallpaper every other day, once the user finishes the survey he gets his wallpaper. I don't know if we can do that with a program, but we will need the Fedora programmers to help us here. Tareq Al Jurf 19:29, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
5. It would be awesome to have a Master List of conferences / Events where a laptop could be set up for on-site surveys. (Linuxcon, Linuxworld, Linuxwhatever, RH Summit, Linux Symposium, etc.)
   • Great idea! Maybe something to ask the Ambassadors team about. Mel Chua 21:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
6. Does Red Hat have any research that could legally be shared with Fedora (maybe a small group of people, or have one person be a gateway - ie: The Gateway person collects questions, and then asks RH market research folks (are there any??) if they can provide answers).
   • I will ask. Mel Chua 21:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
   • Update: Not at this time. Also, the research that Red Hat has is not likely to be as relevant to Fedora - the users they focus on are big enterprise customers, rather than individual users, so this may not be a fruitful tree to bark up... however, an upstream open source marketing community may be of interest, in terms of getting RH support. Something else to look into. Mel Chua 03:14, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
7. Does anyone have any contacts at any major PC / Server vendors (the usual suspects - Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, and the like) that would be a good starting point to see if they would participate in surveys about shipments? We would need a good blurb about why it would be important to participate and what they would get out of it (ie, they are good community participants, it helps them develop a broader market, they get access and input to free research, etc.)
   • I will also ask. Mel Chua 21:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Activities in the same spectrum - Related to Market Research

1. Benchmarking / ensuring the community is recognizing that someone is taking notice of market research results and doing something with it. ie: "Based on user feedback, Fedora 13 has developed / improved 90% of requested features in the following areas...."
2. Educating Fedora/Other distro developers on (a) what market research is and (b) how to use it or incorporate it into their planning / development. This could be a class, presentation given at conferences, guide, or <insert clever idea here>.
3. Develop a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly/quarterly newsletter dedicated to highlighting other market research resources that are available. (This information could also be tracked / disseminated / portal-ized on Fedora_Insight. This includes things like:
   • Reports done by the Linux Foundation
   • Reports done by anyone else that are free
   • Reports that aren't free but have really nice press releases that give out tidbits of information that could be useful.
   • Research / Survey information done by Fedora project marketing. :)

Archives

Archive:Marketing surveys contains some (extremely old and out of date) historical references on prior Fedora surveys.