[Promotion] Research proposal

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Friday 17 February 2006 09:15, John Williams wrote:
> Could we focus our efforts on the sampling frame and data collection
> problems please? 

Absolutely :)


> Broadly stated, they boil down to this: 
>
> What is a method that we can use to contact current and potential users
> of GNOME and KDE in order to ask them some questions?
>
> If we had some money, this would be easy.  We would simply hire someone
> to send out lots of self-completion questionnaires or conduct telephone
> interviews.
>
> But we have no money.  This means, in most people's minds, that we
> should use some kind of WWW based poll.  The problem with this is that
> your sample is usually very biased (unless you can advertise your poll
> all over the net, which needs, you guessed it, lots of money).  We need
> to find a more creative solution than that.
>
> Thoughts?

Are there any ways we can leverage good relations with distributors to reach 
their customer base? I think we're going to have to do several samples, 
taking into account the bias that each sample introduces. For example we can 
do:

- A web-based survey and get all the geeks
- A survey in Linux mags and get semi-geeks
- Surveys in computer labs that we can get contact with, e.g. particular 
schools, arts media labs (I run one and know of a few others), any companies 
we know

The third point could become pretty expansive if we really explore our 
relations more, if we could involve every free desktop hacker.

If we get sufficient data with each sample on who the people are, how they fit 
into our segmentation analysis, that should be of use... correct?

Regards,
Tom

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