Survey Starts Sooooooon!

Monday, January 13, 1997 by Dave Winer.

Good afternooooon!

This release marks the beginning of the second survey of Macintosh developer platform choices.

Voting starts in approximately nine hours. Whew!

It's coming together quickly -- I think quite well.

It's fire-drill mode, but it's not a drill...

Please pass the latte!

Goals 

The primary goal of the survey is to learn about the current direction of the Macintosh development community.

A secondary goal is to understand how things changed last week, when Apple communicated its direction to developers.

Sponsorship 

The sponsors for this survey are "MacWEEK", "Seybold Seminars", and DaveNet. Each of the sponsoring organizations will provide editorial coverage of the results.

After much discussion over the weekend, we decided that sponsorship would be limited to editorial organizations and we'd look to support from platform vendors and developers including Apple, Be, and others.

Please watch the "News & Updates" page for pointers to interesting sites supporting the survey.

Timing 

The survey is open from 12:00:00 AM to 11:59:59 PM Pacific on January 14.

Where to vote 

To cast a vote, visit this page:

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/surveys/97/jan14/

After the survey is complete this page will carry the results of the survey.

Monitoring the returns 

To view the results of the survey in real-time:

http://ws3.scripting.com/daveNet.surveyResults.fcgi

How to point 

If you run a website or a mailing list that is read by Macintosh developers, please visit this page for instructions on pointing to the survey.

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/surveys/97/jan14/pointing.html

Pointers should be posted ASAP so developers have the greatest opportunity to participate.

Cookie policy 

After receiving much email on this subject, I decided to send back a cookie, but not to use it to limit voting. If you save the cookie, if there's a third survey, we'll know how you voted in the second survey, making it possible to generate statistics on how individual votes changed over time.

Honor system 

Please only vote if you are actively developing software for the Macintosh or NextStep platforms.

The survey is being conducted under the honor system. The results will only be as good as the honesty of individual members of the Mac developer community.

We are gathering statistics that will help us judge the quality of the results. We believe that we will be able to detect ballot-stuffing, even if we don't have a mechanism for preventing it.

After the survey is complete we will release the CGI source code and hourly snapshots of the survey data. And we will point you to MacWEEK and Seybold Seminars coverage of the results.

Thanks!

Dave Winer

PS: A latte is a coffee drink with lots of caffeine! Bzzzz.

PPS: Happy 40th Birthday to Marc Canter!