#147: Feedback should be much easier to give
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Reporter: ndroftheline | Owner:
Type: feedback | Status: new
Priority: major | Milestone: Fedora 18
Version: | Severity: Neutral
Resolution: | Keywords:
Blocked By: | Blocking:
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Comment (by ndroftheline):
* anonymous feedback is much less interesting to me personally as it
prevents you from having any kind of dialog with the submitter.
I agree, and I'm glad I had someone to check me in #fedora-social when I
first suggested it. Please note I did not suggest anonymous feedback in
this ticket, and I would like to keep this conversation away from that.
Continuing the dialog is a great point, which I had only vaguely
considered! I think this should inform any decisions to open up the
feedback system - establishing and extending a dialog with these users is
critical to deepening their relationship with the project.
What about this: a page that looks like a forum comment that collects only
4 things: name, email, feedback, and IRC log. This data is held in some
database that sends a confirmation email to the submitting user's email
address which contains a simple "click to validate your feedback" link.
Once the user clicks the link, the database submits the feedback as a trac
ticket just like the current system. This provides a way to collect useful
feedback from a validated address (and thus establish a dialog), while
also lowering the barrier to providing feedback. Of course, if a person
already has an FAS account and wants to give feedback, the validation step
should be skippable.
* Making a fas account ... also allows them to more easily contibute
to other parts of Fedora.
Wow, another great point that I hadn't thought about. I would contend
that, if a person is new to Fedora and has a really bad experience in
#fedora, they are unlikely to be interested in contributing to Fedora (ie,
make a FAS account) unless we can establish a dialog with them in the
first place by getting them to submit feedback - so we should make it
easier to submit feedback. That is, if we don't require an FAS account, we
make it more likely they'll ultimately want (and use!) an FAS account.
* Using trac is an easy choice as it's provided and maintained for
us by
Fedora Infrastructure. Other solutions might not be. We could indeed
look at simplifying the trac forms and such.
This is what I'd like to emphasize - simplify the trac form for providing
IRC feedback. What does simplify mean? Obviously this is a question of
perspective and I would like to firmly ground the default IRC feedback
trac form in the perspective of The Noob - that is, make it linear and
pretty.
* We do have a step by step about submitting feedback in:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha/How_to_file_a_trac_ticket
We should get that finished and point to it.
Is it possible to just include those instructions and graphics in a single
line at the top of the feedback landing page? I think that would be
preferable to linking. This is a great first step - but lets make the
buttons easier to find! And the graphics/instructions need to be updated -
the pics indicate Login, but the link is now OpenID Login.
<rant>
This whole thing about collecting feedback is, in my opinion, closely tied
to the direction Fedora might be going in. The other night in #fedora-
social I participated in a conversation about the direction of the Fedora
Project. The idea that Fedora should be a developer-oriented project was
floated and I must say I think that Fedora is very well positioned to be a
developer-oriented project. I mean, Fedora is upstream of RHEL and all
RHEL-related projects. It's quite telling when a single project adopts a
new method for doing something (like, say, systemd) and suddenly the
entire ecosystem starts rumbling about how the new change is being forced
on them. That says that what Fedora does has quite an impact on the
ecosystem, because the ecosystem sees that Fedora lies upstream of it -
and that eventually, whatever Fedora adopts, will become more-or-less
standard across the board. My point being that Fedora pretty much defines
what it means to be a project leading development. A project for
developers.
BUT - note the caps - what's a developer? Are we only talking about source
hackers? What about web devs? What about people who make pretty logos?
What about people who do translations, package other software, or "just"
write documentation? What about people whose only contribution to the
entire project is to file bug reports using the intergrated bug reporting
tools?
I submit that these developers are absolutely critical to the
proliferation of any Free community. And while using the term developer so
loosely does seem strange, it's also not quite accurate to call any proper
end user of a community project like Fedora _just_ a user. Community
projects don't operate that way, do they? This isn't a provider-client
relationship. It's a community relationship we want to cultivate. Users of
Fedora should be invited to join the community - they should be included
and encouraged. They should fall in love with Fedora, like everybody
reading this did at some point.
So how do we strengthen that relationship? How do we attract developers
(using the term loosely again) to join and contribute to the project?
Well, I think we can take lessons from researchers focused on customer
loyalty. Like I said, it's not the same - we're not trying to attract
customers, we're trying to cultivate community members - but it is
strongly related and a lot of the psychology is highly informative.
http://www.guywinch.com/the-psychology-of-customer-loyalty/
A successful customer loyalty strategy must establish opportunities
for a company to forge deep and personal connections with their customers.
Fortunately, companies are provided perfect vehicles to create exactly
this kind of relationship change—when customers voice complaints.
Indeed, studies repeatedly demonstrate that successful service
recoveries make customers more loyal to a company than they were before
they ever encountered a problem. In addition, customers typically relate
stories of successful service recoveries to numerous friends and
acquaintances, providing excellent word of mouth for the company in
question.
Companies that want to increase customer loyalty should therefore make
it as easy as possible for their customers to complain. In addition to
gaining vital information about potential problems, excellent service
recoveries enhances customers’ confidence and trust, deepens their
emotional connection to the company and dramatically increases their
customer loyalty.
So here we are at the crux of this rant. To deepen our community (and
therefore make it more attractive to more expert devs) we need to make
feedback easier to provide. This is not some one-off, it's a deep-seated
aspect of human behavior. Problem resolution builds relationships, teams,
and communities. Let's let our users identify problems, so we can resolve
them, and then bring them into the fold.
Let's make Fedora a project that doesn't only cater to developers, but in
fact _makes_ them. Fedora the developer forge.
</rant>
PS. I can't make the meeting. Tight sched this week, and that time is
right in the middle of my work day.
--
Ticket URL: <
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