Sam Varghese
Monday, 12 May 2008 23:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 6
Shortly after the presentation began, a member of the audience asked about the sample size which was used to determine the results. Pia Waugh, who was doing the main presentation, had begun by citing only percentages. To this question, Jeff Waugh responded: "We will get to that, we will get to that." The figure - 327 - was only given towards the end of the presentation. This figure determines whether the survey findings about the community stand or fall.
(A video of the presentation is
here; you can see the question I refer to about nine and a half minutes into the presentation.)
It made me wonder why the figure was not given out right away. (Rupert Murdoch's Sky News runs polls every day and presents the results as "42 percent voted yes, and 58 percent voted no," but they never give you any numbers which makes the poll meaningless.)
A number of graphs presented at the time had no indication of what some of the axes represented. I figured that since the presentation must have been done in a hurry to catch the conference deadline, it would be unfair to report about it at that stage. If a report had been written then, it would probably have made the effort look very amateurish.
Despite this, several news outlets wrote up the survey in glorious detail. I waited for the final product. In the run-up to the release, there was more publicity, including
one piece in iTWire on March 10, by my editor Stan Beer. However this piece steered clear of accepting the survey results as gospel, citing all findings as claims made by the company. Several other outlets were not half as careful.
My colleague, GNU/Linux guru David M. Williams, who wrote
a detailed piece about the survey for iTWire on April 14 which contained a fair degree of fine analysis, touched on the one aspect of the survey which troubled me.
