Re: Running a Guix User and Contributor survey

[Wilko Meyer <w@wmeyer.eu>]

Hi Steve,

Steve George <steve@futurile.net> writes:

> I've designed a 'Guix User and Contributor Survey' which I'd like to run to 
> explore what users love about Guix, and how contributors interact 
> with the project. I would love feedback on it.

Thanks for putting work into this, that's awesome! In terms of general
feedback: There was a general discussion on surveys[0] a year ago, I'd
like to highlight this mail[1] by Katherine in particular, as it
contains excellent points on survey/questionnaire design and good
practices.

Regarding your proposed questionnaire: I think that it would benefit
from asking about the level of Guile proficiency/if there's
prior-experience with lisp family languages/if people learned Guile
because of Guix.

> * The tricky part of running a survey is keeping it to a reasonable length, you 
> quickly find there's lots you'd love to know, but the balancing factor is the 
> more questions someone has to answer the lower the completion rate! Ideas on 
> how to shorten the design while keeping the same areas of enquiry would be 
> welcome.

It could be feasible to categorize questions into two boxes:

- Questions we want to track over time as we want to track how responses
  change over the years, that have to be iterated yearly.
- Questions we want to ask once/every few years, as we want to work with
  a snapshot in time instead of longterm tracking answers in short
  iterations.

and then have a annual/biennial survey, always asking all questions from
the first box, and then split-up questions from the second box
throughout the years. 

> * If anyone has skills/experience in analysing results and would like to get 
> involved I would love help.

Don't know yet what my timebudget will look like when the results are
in, but generally I'd be available for this (if time permits)!

[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-09/msg00402.html
[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-09/msg00481.html

-- 
Kind regards,
Wilko Meyer