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A Little PARIS Research - Size of user community [message #99409] Thu, 03 July 2008 12:58 Go to previous message
kerryg is currently offline  kerryg   CANADA
Messages: 1529
Registered: February 2009
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Hi folks. Hereıs one of a series of updates/info posts (and - brace
yourselves - some action requests) which Iıll be putting in separate posts.

Iıve been working on some basic infrastructure that I reckon we need to
support any forward motion. Blog/wiki/networking/development rig are
certainly part of that infrastructure but we also had a serious need for
hard info - things like current community size and composition etc. If we
want to tell outside developers who we are as a community, we better know
who we are first, and I had the suspicion that my "spitball" guesstimates
weren't doing us much justice.

Now, Iım not trained in data collection and analysis but I do fine at
research and detective work, and what I lack in skills I cheerfully
supplement with grunt work. I wanted to share one of the results of that
basic research with you all.

Iıve seen the question ³how big is the PARIS community?² asked several times
before. As far as I know we never got a definitive answer. We've now got a
fairly firm "floor" for the size of the current PARIS user community. It
stands at an eye-opening (at least to me) 125 current users - and rising, so
if anything thatıs an undercount. Mike Audet and I have independently come
to an estimate of the user community worldwide (including PARIS users who
don't come to the NG) as being in the vicinity of a healthy 400 current
users.

Surprised? Not bad for eight years after discontinuation!

Iıll be clear - this is not derived from the number of NG posters - itıs
derived from a fairly accurate hand count of the number of currently active
PARIS *users* that Iıve identified on the NG over the last ten months, and
is distinct from the size of the NG community itself. We needed that info
broken out separately because while some developments (say the ability to
open PARIS .ppjs without a PARIS rig) might indeed be of interest to
ex-PARIS users too (who might still retain archives in .ppj format), other
developments (say drivers) would really only be of interest to those who
still have and use PARIS hardware.

To gather those numbers I ruled out the past approach of polls and censuses;
theyıre useful for getting a ³general sense of the community² but theyıre
unreliable. I simply scanned through the NG posts going back an arbitrary
length of time (10 months) and noted every poster I could in that recent
timespan who indicated that theyıre current users (self-identification,
posting PARIS-specific tech support questions, specific error code
questions, etc). I put the info in a database to sort it in different ways
so I could pretty confidently eliminate duplicates. It was a bit
labour-intensive but the end result is that Iım fairly confident in that
number as a ³hard floor² ­ the loss of a few users in the intervening months
would be counterbalanced by the certainty of undercount.

Iıll finish with a general observation - ³what we were² or ³what we might
once have been² has some minor academic/historical interest to me, but as a
"minority case" - a returning user after years of absence - I naturally come
to it from the perspective of ³where we are right now². Iım not interested
in ³might have beens² any more - Iım interested in what we might achieve
starting from here and going forward.

So while it's true we were larger long ago, a hard floor of 125 real users
is a good strong number, an excellent number, for aficionado-driven efforts
for a discontinued niche market DAW to go forward with. Itıs much larger
than some aficionado groups for other pieces of discontinued technology, and
some of those smaller groups have got quite a lot of very meaningful work
done. And 400 users worldwide may not be Nuendo numbers but for small
developers itıs nothing to sneeze at.

Hope this is of interest!

- Kerry

"... being bitter is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die..." - anon

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