Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Jean Louis]

* Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> [2020-10-11 18:15]:
> Actually, we already have this functionality, which is
> submitting free-form feedback of any kind.  We call it
> an enhancement request, and we tell users to use
> `M-x report-emacs-bug' for it.  This is not as well
> known as it should be, IMO.

Only that "report Emacs bug" does not sound as free form feedback of
any kind. I know it is, but it does not sound as enhancement
request. It takes time for person to realize that.

> It would be good for the `Help' menu to have an item
> that explicitly calls this `Suggest Improvements' or
> similar.  It would be bound to `report-emacs-bug'.

Such menu in Help could lead users to subscribe, unsubscribe, review
or send email to help-gnu-emacs mailing list, send improvement or
enhancement suggestions or anything, similar like GNU Hyperbole is
doing it since decades.

Survey in the context of the opinion poll:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survey_(human_research)#Opinion_poll

The Help menu that would easier enable communication channel with
users is necessary.

Survey itself is not as much important as the ability or capacity in
Emacs development to analyse the data that is already there in public,
as I mentioned, bug report database is there, and there are numbers of
stars or likes on various public projects, then there are search
engines, and various comments of users on other public channels.

Subject of stars/likes and considering that users really like
something because of number of stars/likes is doubtful. Those who have
spent few  thousand dollars on advertising of their services or
products, they will know why is number of stars/likes doubtful.

Example is Spacemacs configuration, I do not know if it is
"configuration" or "text editor built on top of Emacs" as it says on
Archlinux website: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Spacemacs

What I may say about that, even if Spacemacs developers did not
advertise, they could as well advertise for it and obtain those
stars/likes and apparent online popularity. But number of stars does
not necessarily mean number of users.

Number of users publishing online that they use Spacemacs, does not
necessarily mean that is less then number of users who do not use
Spacemacs, maybe those groups are not willing to publish their
statements, or find it silly, like I do. I find it silly to argue
about theming, fonts, but maybe is that exactly what is attracting
users, some nice theme, flashy, shiny stuff.

That is up to Emacs analysis department (emacs-devel) to accept as
challenge.

> I've said this before (dunno whether I've proposed a separate `Help'
> menu item).  We should make `report-emacs-bug' better known as a
> recommended way to submit ANY feedback about Emacs.

Definitely. 

> The command name can mislead wrt this role.  A
> separate `Help' menu item would help (even though
> redundant with item `Send Bug Report').  Or change
> that item to `Send Feedback or Bug Report'.
> 
> It might also make sense, for discoverability etc.,
> to add a `send-feedback' alias for `send-bug-report'.

That is right.

> Well, it doesn't constitute a "survey", but it does correspond to
> what RMS, I, and Jean-Louis have emphasized here: getting users to
> say, in their own words, what they want and what they do.

Let me emphasize again, there is number of users who will never speak
in public or publish their opinion, why should they? (as thinking from
their view point). In my opinion that is greater number of Emacs
users. It has to be taken in consideration if then developers are
working only for those who are online louder and more exposed to talk,
or if they should be maybe working on some set of principles for
general users.

Let me give you few practical examples from:
https://www.debian.org/users/

There are listed among others, following organizations:

* Electronics Research Group, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland
* Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
* General Students' Committee (AStA), Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
* Athénée Royal de Gembloux, Gembloux, Belgium
* Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
* Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, UK
* Centro de Comunicación Científica, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
* CEIC, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy
* Mexican Space Weather Service (SCiESMEX), Geophysics Institute campus Morelia 
(IGUM), National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico
* COC Araraquara, Brazil
* Department of Computer Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India
* Departamento de Arquitectura y Tecnología de Sistemas Informáticos (Facultad 
de Informática), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
* Department of Control Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech 
Technical University, Czech Republic
* Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Department of Physics, ETH 
Zurich, Switzerland
* Formation Canadienne, Université Libre de Guinée (UG), Conakry, Republic of 
Guinea
* Genomics Research Group, CRIBI - Università di Padova, Italy
* Department of Geological Sciences and Geotechnology, University of 
Milano-Bicocca, Italy
* Dipartimento di Geoscienze, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
* Nucleo Lab, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia
* Department of Physics, Harvard University, USA

I am to assume that among those organizations there are many people
using Emacs, people of different characteristics, not of those groups
who like theming and online popularities, so those people in those
organizations, who use Emacs, in my opinion, would be less loud online
to promote Emacs in the manner how Doom/Spacemacs or others are doing
it. Such people would be impossible to reach by publishing some online
survey anywhere, but they could be reached through Help menu.

There are various groups of people, now we have groups of people who
think that Spacemacs is editor built on top of Emacs, maybe it is
true, so it is written, but that group of people is now mentioning
"Spacemacs" and not Emacs, so they will even ask classic Emacs
questions under Spacemacs subjects online. To introduce those users to
Emacs development and helpful mailing lists, such menu Help -->
Contact us or Tell us your opinion, would be helpful.

But nevertheless Spacemacs as example of online apparent popularity,
not the real popularity. What if Spacemacs have employed advertising
to reach stars and likes? That is not hard to do.

I do not think that Emacs ever advertised as commercial companies are
doing it, it is self-advertised and promoted through OS distributions.

Real popularity could be somehow obtained if GNU/Linux distributions
and BSD and other operating system distributions and Emacs main
website would publish their statistics.

Real data useful for surveys cannot be accurately obtained by
publishing such survey online anywhere else but in Emacs itself,
including with email and with the anonymous form submission where no
personal user information will be entered. I would even state
explicitly that no IP logs will be kept, all would go to /dev/null and
systems like captcha would not be necessary, as Emacs could formulate
the buffer with the HTML rendered and viewed with eww that already
contains inside tokens that will recognize that such form is coming
from within Emacs and from nowhere else. Separate form could be made
for online public.

Summary:

- there are different groups of users, in my opinion, development is
  rather looking onto feedback of those who are more loud online, as
  those who don't communicate they cannot be reached anyway

- those groups of users who are publicly telling about their ideas
  related to Emacs, may not be, or may be, representative or majority
  group of users, but myself I doubt they are. Relying that those
  groups are representative for majority of Emacs users is doubtful as
  well. 

- it is better to develop for majority, just as by principle was done
  for years for and within Emacs, and I would say to skip all the
  surveys, and to increase the analysis and enhancement
  capacities. Data is already there as mentioned.

- if any survey is done, such survey should target to find out what
  the majority really wants, in order to bring about more Emacs
  popularity. But looking into present popular projects, one can
  easily draw conclusions without vias.

- add the button in the Help menu to contact help-gnu-emacs mailing
  list, subscribe, unsubscribe, send email anyway, or send feedback or
  send bug report. The "Send bug report" menu could be converted to
  multi menu doing that feature.