[PD-dev] Survey (was Re: opt-in usage statistics 'phone home')

[Chris McCormick]

On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 10:43:31AM -0500, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> >Right now, there have been roughly 17,000 downloads of the last 
> >Pd-extended release, according to SourceForge:
> >http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55736&package_id=76013
> >I'd like to know how many people use it, and for what.
> 
> I bet that 16,000 of them were made by Cycling74 to make us feel 
> overconfident. ;)

Hehe

> The pd-list has only 1457 subscribers. pd-dev has 506 subscribers.
> A lot of them have subscription disabled, possibly because the email 
> address has changed and MailMan never really removes subscribers.
> For example, pd-list has only 1002 enabled subscribers.

I am not sure that number of subscribers to the mailing list is an
accurate representation of number of current users. I know from releases
of my own software in the past, the subscriber to download ratio is
always very very low. I hypothesise that a majority of software users
are interested only in the software itself, and don't know/don't care
about the community, or don't like mailing lists.

1000 users on the mailing list is a good sample for a survey
though! Attached is a survey, please have a look and add to it,
change it, whatever. I think Hans probably has a good idea of all
the different sets of externals and libraries out there since he does
packaging of them all. I was not sure whether or not to include questions
about sex/age/whatever because I'm not sure if it's relevant, or even
offensive. It would be cool to make this into a web form on the plone
site, but I don't know anything about that, so I've CC'ed this to the
pd-web list.

I am against the idea of Pd 'phoning home' for the same reasons as Tim,
and I think it would be too hard to get the code into all the different
versions of Pd out there anyway.

Best,

Chris.

-------------------
chris at mccormick.cx
http://mccormick.cx
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Place an X in boxes like this: [X] You may tick multiple boxes.

General use of Puredata, where 'Puredata' means any software product derived from Puredata:

 [ ] I use it every day
 [ ] I use it at least once a week
 [ ] I use it at least once a month
 [ ] I rarely use Puredata
 [ ] I use Puredata in my professional work
 [ ] I use Puredata as a hobby

Puredata variants that you use:

 [ ] Miller's Puredata from his website
 [ ] Pd-extended from Hans' installer
 [ ] PdVST
 [ ] PDa (or gp2xPd)
 [ ] Netpd
 Which version number do you use (the current is 0.40): ___

Audio/Visual (please tick one):
 
 [ ] I use it primarily for audio
 [ ] I use it mostly for audio with some graphics
 [ ] I use it for both audio and graphics equally
 [ ] I use it mostly for graphics with some audio
 [ ] I use it primarily for graphics

Operating System:

 [ ] I use it on a Linux based operating system
 [ ] I use it on a Mac based operating system
 [ ] I use it on a Windows based operating system
 [ ] I use it on a handheld/embedded system
 [ ] I compiled it for a PDP-11 and run it there because I am insane

Abstraction kits:

 [ ] I use RRRadical
 [ ] I use fbar's list-abs
 (Please help me add more)
 [ ] I regularly use the following abstraction kits: ______________________

Externals:

 (Please help me with this. Externals are not my area of expertise)

Libraries:

 [ ] Zexy
 [ ] Gem
 [ ] GridFlow
 [ ] PDP
 [ ] PiDiP
 [ ] IEMlib
 [ ] maxlib
 [ ] cyclone