Comment 427 for bug 532633

On 25/03/10 22:25, Atel Apsfej wrote:
> Good, finally some guidance. You shouldn't wait for people to think up
> data products on their own, that risks people spinning their wheels
> creating "data" that gets discarded because it doesn't meet your
> definition and leads to people feeling they are being ignored.
>

We should learn from any data that's presented. If someone comes up with
interesting data, we should gather what insight we can from it. And I
would be cautious to define in advance the set of "things that might
influence us". In my experience, inspiration and caution can come from
unpredictable sources, and quite usefully so.

> You and the design team are the only group in a position define what is
> acceptable data in your decision-making process. Putting forward some
> questions you want answered like you did above is helpful.

OK, fair enough. In future, I'll be quicker to outline things that
*might* be interesting, and encurage the team to do the same, but will
still encourage folks to be inventive with their research and analysis.
Otherwise we're not really crowdsourcing insight.

> But you could
> go further, and articulate a framework by which questions can be
> proposed by externals, accepted by the design team as important to the
> design process, and then answered with an acceptable data collection
> methodology.
>

There are certainly some questions that could definitively be answered
with a single data set. We could keep an eye out for those. But they are
relatively special. In this case, I can't think of a single data set
that would be definitive. But that's why I'd prefer to leave the floor
open to folks to suggest ones that might.

> If you do not articulate a data feedback framework that is acceptable to
> the design team then how is anyone suppose to know what you think is and
> is not acceptable? If you don't have a process by which people can
> propose questions worth answering with data, how do people know what to
> collect data on?
>

Collect data on what's interesting to you. Most of us do this because
it's interesting, and we like both the company (that's you ;-)) and the
domain. I can't guarantee that any contribution will make it into
Ubuntu, whether it be a patch or a translation or a package or an idea.
But they all make it richer, one way or another. And work that doesn't
get picked up here is still part of the commons and may have an impact
elsewhere.

Mark