[mythtv-users] FLOSS MC Survey closing date

[Giovani Spagnolo]

Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> On Aug 6, 2008, at 11:30 AM, Marc Randolph wrote:
>   
>>> I started answering that but a lot of the (How many of X ) questions 
>>> I do not know the answer so I did not submit.
>> I have to admit I don't understand the purpose of this at all.
>>
>> The survey appears to ask about the facts of MythTV (how many file
>> formats, etc), rather than the opinions about MythTV.  Facts can be
>> collected from the MythTV web site(s) or having one person fill out
>> the survey - you don't need to survey 5 or 20 people.  All you're
>> doing is wasting the time of a lot of people.
>>
>>   Marc
>>     
> I started looking at the survey, thought the same thing, and closed  
> the browser window. Why do I need to spend my time looking up info in  
> the wiki to tell someone how many video format it supports? I do that  
> enough when people ask questions and I know I saw the answer in the  
> wiki somewhere. :)
>   
You would be amazed by knowing how many people simply doesn't know how 
to answer many of those "fact" questions or how controversial some 
answers are. Others provide very useful notes along with their answer 
which help a lot. But there's certainly an information gap to be filled.

Maybe you're part of the fortunate small percentage of people in the 
community who knows *everything* the software can and can't do, but 
think about the majority of users who struggle each day to find out *if* 
they can do this or that or simply do not have time to search the wiki 
and find a short answer... This is why we are investing our time (and 
time of people who want to help) in a *State of the Art* paper on floss 
media centers.

Coding is a great thing (if not the most important) in a FLOSS 
community, but it's not the only one. People also need to be informed on 
what the software can do, which other options are out there, which one 
fits best to their needs. We are a small organization and can't afford 
having people full time reading all floss mc wiki's and forums for every 
answer, so that's another reason to survey developers and power users to 
try getting the most accurate "facts" as possible and cross-check 
controversial facts.

We intend to leave this as work open as a work-in-progress and try to 
constantly update the document to make it represent the status of each 
MC project, maybe once or twice a year. And it's going to be a Creative 
Commons licensed work...

No one is forced to participate, but just don't demotivate who might 
want to help others this way.

cheers,
giovani spagnolo