Should we restart the Unicode voting?

Hi,

Yesterday an email from "Dave Neary" was sent to all maemo.org users asking them to vote. The text was unclear, most people didn't get who is Dave and how did he get ttheir emails, the context was missing, some of the characters were not displayed properly and there were problems in the voting interface itself. I got some emails of confused users, Dave got many more and a Talk thread was started with more confused users (can't access Talk right now, it's in the Community forum).

Maybe we can tell this was a false start? I take my part of the blame for assuming that some text would be drafted and agreed before being sent. Probably it should have been me the one doing it. I assumed Dave would take the pieces from the short discussion we had here. My apologies.

Still, people are not getting the point of the survey, which is sad since on the other hand I'm sure this is the type of Nokia-community collaboration the average maemo.org is looking forward.

So here we go with a proposal for a fresh start, urgently today:

SUBJECT
Survey: what characters matter in a mobile keyboard?

BODY

Dear $NAME,

You are receiving this email as a maemo.org registered user. It's an invitation to take part in a survey organized by the Maemo community after a proposal from the Maemo Devices team at Nokia.

The question is about keyboards in mobile devices. What characters to put, what characters to sacrifice? You know it's a hot topic and maybe yourself have thought sometimes: why do
they put X which I don't used, while Y is missing?

So the Maemo team is doing the usual research, but they are also interested in getting some direct feedback from maemo.org users. Do you want to have your say?

Question:

What characters would you prefer to have in the hardware keyboard? Set your preference starting from the most preferred.

$ % & ( ) < = > \ _ | ~ £ €

Voting will run from Dec 1st until Dec 15th 2009, 23:59 UTC.

To vote, please go to http://maemo.org/vote/ and follow the instructions there.

When instructed to do so, enter the following details:

E-mail:
Vote token:

The election has 4 steps - first, you must identify yourself using the voting token above. Then select your preferred candidates in order of preference. A third step will show you your choice, and ask you to confirm or return to the previous step. Finally, after confirming your choice, a unique identifier will be given to you which will allow you to verify after the election that your vote was counted correctly. To ensure anonymity, no link will be kept between this token and your identifiers, so please keep this token safe. Once you have voted, you will not be able to vote again.

Thank you for your vote! The results will be published around December 16th at http://maemo.org/news

Regards,

The Maemo Community Council




----- Original message -----
>
> Dear Quim,
>
> We are running an election to see which of the following characters
> are most important to you on Maemo:
>    $ % & ( ) < = > \ _ | ~ £ €
>
> Voting will run from Dec 1st until Dec 15th 2009,
> 23:59 UTC.
>
> To vote, please go to http://maemo.org/vote/ and follow the
> instructions there.
>
> When instructed to do so, enter the following details:
>
> E-mail: quim.gil@nokia.com
> Vote token: ZkN243H9fo
>
> The election has 4 steps - first, you must identify yourself using the
> voting token above. Then select your preferred candidates in order of
> preference. A third step will show you your choice, and ask you to
> confirm or return to the previous step. Finally, after confirming your
> choice, a unique identifier will be given to you which will allow you
> to
> verify after the election that your vote was counted correctly. To
> ensure
> anonymity, no link will be kept between this token and your
> identifiers,
> so please keep this token safe. Once you have voted, you will not be
> able
> to vote again.
>
> Thank you for your vote!
>
> Regards,
> Dave Neary, on behalf of the Maemo community.
>
>

Quim wrote:
>
> You are receiving this email as a maemo.org registered user. It's an invitation
> to take part in a survey organized by the Maemo community after a proposal from
> the Maemo Devices team at Nokia.
>
> The question is about keyboards in mobile devices. What characters to put, what
> characters to sacrifice?

Obvious question here is whether this is direct keys, blue-arrow keys or characters in the palette. I'm assuming it's to determine the relative placement of all three.

You know it's a hot topic and maybe yourself have
> thought sometimes: why do they put X which I don't used, while Y is missing?

s/used/use/. However, I'd remove this sentence entirely.

> $ % & ( ) < = > \  _ | ~ £ €

I thought there was an argument that the currency symbols should be removed as within a market they're important (perhaps less so to a savvy user, but I can imagine the reviews if a UK device doesn't show a pound sign), but a lot less so outside that market. It's probably also worth saying that all these keys would be accessible *somehow*.

Also, I'd suggest very carefully controlled test. Given the multi-regions receiving the email, the character encoding should be UTF-8, and this may require a change to the vote email sending thing.

Character encoding issues are hard to get right (especially in a system which wasn't designed for top-bit set characters and has multiple clients working off a loose spec), but they are very visible when you get them wrong.

Similarly, the voting page should have it's headers and bytes carefully inspected.

Cheers,

Andrew

--
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew@bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/

Hi,

We can send out a new email, clear the votes, change the text - this is
all easy to do. I think we will confuse those who've already voted.

Mea culpa for the email sent out and the election mishaps - it was done
very quickly, as I was going out the door (late) for a meeting, and I
passed everything to Ferenc, who was doing an election for the first
time. And I didn't mention to him that we usually test the election
ourselves before sending email to members.

For the text, I'll admit that beyond the comment that it was a request
from the hardware guys, I didn't get all the context for the election &
agree that the result is quite unclear. Part of the confusion came from
calling this "the unicode election" when in fact all but 2 of the
characters are normal ANSI.

It's possible to maintain existing votes, or wipe the slate & ask people
to vote again. I'm easy either way. Which is preferable?

Cheers,
Dave.

quim.gil@nokia.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Yesterday an email from "Dave Neary" was sent to all maemo.org users
> asking them to vote. The text was unclear, most people didn't get who
> is Dave and how did he get ttheir emails, the context was missing,
> some of the characters were not displayed properly and there were
> problems in the voting interface itself. I got some emails of
> confused users, Dave got many more and a Talk thread was started with
> more confused users (can't access Talk right now, it's in the
> Community forum).
>
> Maybe we can tell this was a false start? I take my part of the blame
> for assuming that some text would be drafted and agreed before being
> sent. Probably it should have been me the one doing it. I assumed
> Dave would take the pieces from the short discussion we had here. My
> apologies.
>
> Still, people are not getting the point of the survey, which is sad
> since on the other hand I'm sure this is the type of Nokia-community
> collaboration the average maemo.org is looking forward.
>
> So here we go with a proposal for a fresh start, urgently today:
>
> SUBJECT Survey: what characters matter in a mobile keyboard?
>
> BODY
>
> Dear $NAME,
>
> You are receiving this email as a maemo.org registered user. It's an
> invitation to take part in a survey organized by the Maemo community
> after a proposal from the Maemo Devices team at Nokia.
>
> The question is about keyboards in mobile devices. What characters to
> put, what characters to sacrifice? You know it's a hot topic and
> maybe yourself have thought sometimes: why do they put X which I
> don't used, while Y is missing?
>
> So the Maemo team is doing the usual research, but they are also
> interested in getting some direct feedback from maemo.org users. Do
> you want to have your say?
>
> Question:
>
> What characters would you prefer to have in the hardware keyboard?
> Set your preference starting from the most preferred.
>
> $ % & ( ) < = > \ _ | ~ £ €
>
> Voting will run from Dec 1st until Dec 15th 2009, 23:59 UTC.
>
> To vote, please go to http://maemo.org/vote/ and follow the
> instructions there.
>
> When instructed to do so, enter the following details:
>
> E-mail: Vote token:
>
> The election has 4 steps - first, you must identify yourself using
> the voting token above. Then select your preferred candidates in
> order of preference. A third step will show you your choice, and ask
> you to confirm or return to the previous step. Finally, after
> confirming your choice, a unique identifier will be given to you
> which will allow you to verify after the election that your vote was
> counted correctly. To ensure anonymity, no link will be kept between
> this token and your identifiers, so please keep this token safe. Once
> you have voted, you will not be able to vote again.
>
> Thank you for your vote! The results will be published around
> December 16th at http://maemo.org/news
>
> Regards,
>
> The Maemo Community Council
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original message -----
>> Dear Quim,
>>
>> We are running an election to see which of the following characters
>> are most important to you on Maemo: $ % & ( ) < = > \ _ | ~ £ €
>>
>>
>> Voting will run from Dec 1st until Dec 15th 2009, 23:59 UTC.
>>
>> To vote, please go to http://maemo.org/vote/ and follow the
>> instructions there.
>>
>> When instructed to do so, enter the following details:
>>
>> E-mail: quim.gil@nokia.com Vote token: ZkN243H9fo
>>
>> The election has 4 steps - first, you must identify yourself using
>> the voting token above. Then select your preferred candidates in
>> order of preference. A third step will show you your choice, and
>> ask you to confirm or return to the previous step. Finally, after
>> confirming your choice, a unique identifier will be given to you
>> which will allow you to verify after the election that your vote
>> was counted correctly. To ensure anonymity, no link will be kept
>> between this token and your identifiers, so please keep this token
>> safe. Once you have voted, you will not be able to vote again.
>>
>> Thank you for your vote!
>>
>> Regards, Dave Neary, on behalf of the Maemo community.
>>
>>

--
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary@maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh@jabber.org

Hi,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> Obvious question here is whether this is direct keys, blue-arrow keys
> or characters in the palette. I'm assuming it's to determine the
> relative placement of all three.

Looking at the N900 keyboard, it seems most likely to be blue-arrow keys.

>> $ % & ( ) < = > \ _ | ~ £ €
>
> I thought there was an argument that the currency symbols should be
> removed as within a market they're important (perhaps less so to a
> savvy user, but I can imagine the reviews if a UK device doesn't show
> a pound sign), but a lot less so outside that market. It's probably
> also worth saying that all these keys would be accessible *somehow*.

Funny enough the "pound" symbol is # for most Americans, since on uk
keyboards £ is in the same place as #.

I had feedback from several voters that $ is important for shell users,
in spite of being non-Americans.

I guess this will depend on the size of the markets & the cost of
producing different keyboards more than our opinion :)

> Also, I'd suggest very carefully controlled test. Given the
> multi-regions receiving the email, the character encoding should be
> UTF-8, and this may require a change to the vote email sending thing.

We can blame the Mail::Internet perl module. Do we need to add an extra
header line to make the mail specify UTF8 encoding?

Cheers,
Dave.

--
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary@maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh@jabber.org