Open Stack

I'm hearing a lot of negative feedback about the user survey, and I 
thought I should share it with this list. Please take this in the spirit 
in which it is intended - a desire to improve the survey and make it 
more valuable to all of our constituents, rather than criticism of the 
folks that have put their time and effort into it so far.

There are two big complaints that I hear consistently.

1) The sample size. 
http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/openstack-users-share-how-their-deployments-stack-up 
is based on 270 deployments. This seems really small, given what we keep 
saying the global market for OpenStack is. This calls into question the 
validity of any conclusions we can draw from the numbers.

2) Consistency from one survey to the next. It is very hard to determine 
any kind of trends when the survey, and the reporting mechanism, changes 
so much from one time to the next. Yes, adjustments will be made from 
one survey to the next, but the inability to determine trends is very 
frustrating.

There's one lesser complaint that I hear some, and that's that the wall 
around the survey is too high. That is, when I go to fill out the survey 
it asks me to become an individual member of the OpenStack Foundation, 
and that's quite a surprise to someone that's been asked to fill out a 
survey about their installation. I suspect we lose a lot of potential 
answers to this, based on booth conversations at events.

I am not a statistician - I used to be mathematician but I can't even 
claim that any more. I don't know what the solutions to these problems 
are. But I wanted to be sure that this committee is aware that these are 
the complaints that are being aired.

I'm sure that some of the complaints are from people who don't feel that 
the numbers reflect well on their particular project or company, and 
that's to be expected (and probably ignored). But if there are ways that 
we can improve the survey, and get better numbers from the broader 
community, that would seem to be a big benefit to everyone.


-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen at redhat.com
OpenStack Community Liaison
http://rdoproject.org/