Re: Running a Guix User and Contributor survey

[Steve George <steve@futurile.net>]

Hi Wilko,

Thanks for going through it.

On  1 Nov, Wilko Meyer wrote:
> 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.
(...)

I remembered that thread when I started my design document, and then promptly forgot! Thanks for the reminder I'll go through it. 

> 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.
(...)

Did you see that I put in Guile/Scheme/Lisp as both motivators for new users, but also asking whether they were challenges for learning. Although, we haven't directly asked 'do you have prior experience in Lisp' we should get good insight into the overall situation.

The second part is separate I think: are you interested in whether Guile is seing new users 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. 
(...)

Yes understood. For the first survey or so, we should expect some changes as trends and areas of concern become clear. 

As we've already seen it's generally true that additional questions are easy to come up with, but removing them is a lot harder.

> > * 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)!
> 

Understood, I'll ping you when the time comes to see if you have any time.

Steve / Futurile