Hi Guix, I haven't had enough time to read up on every topic that has been mentioned in the "How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?" discussion as at some point it got quite a lot to follow. At one point[0] there was a discussion on having a survey to get a better picture on and quantify what potential blockers are to engage with/contribute to Guix; which seems, if done right (as surveys have to be carefully crafted), a good idea; especially with the prospect of repeating it annually as a means to check if issues got better/priorities in Guixes userbase change and so on. If there's a consensus on doing this, I'd be happy to contribute some of my time to get things going (would creating a issue on guixes bug tracker for this topic be a good idea? how are these non-code contrib. topics handled?).
Before writing this mail, I had a look on how other projects handle these kind of surveys, in particular: - the emacs user survey[1] - the nix community survey[2] - the curl user survey[3] - the fennel survey[4] I identified a few key themes that could be useful for a guix user survey as well. I plan on doing a more extensive summary on this later this weekend if my time allows it, for now a loose collection of ideas/list of what, in my subjective opinion, stood out and what most surveys had in common should do to hopefully get a discussion on this started: - the emacs user survey specifically asked for elisp profiency; mapping out the Guile profiency of guixes community could be feasible. - fennel as well as emacs had questions on which programming languages their community uses; in the regards on recent discussions on guix-devel on developer ecosystems[4] this could help to identify if there are any shortcomings in providing importers/packages for certain languages that may be used by guix users. - the nix survey specifically asked for the environments and context nix is being used in; it'd be interesting to see where and for what purpose people are using Guix. - most surveys had, some more some less extensive, demographic questions and questions mapping out how many years people have been programming. Specifially in the lights of the original discussion/regarding contributions: - I think that the "Where do you discuss Fennel or interact with other Fennel developers" question of fennels survey should be asked for guix as well, to get a grasp on which platforms are being used to discuss all things guix. - the curl user survey[6] did a pretty good job in mapping out what prevents users from contributing (p.20) as well as mapping out what areas of the project are regarding as good/which have room for improvements (p.24-26) - fennel asked for "the biggest problems you have using Fennel", it had a "If you haven't hacked on Fennel itself, why not?" question as well. I personally think this could be good to assess potential pain points/blockers for Guix as well. Fennel also asked for "favorite features" which could be a nice way to map out which parts of Guix are popular. Last, the nix user survey allowed free-form responses. Having a qualitative research component to a survey could help getting better results (especially when identifying problems in using guix/blockers in contributing and so on); but evaluating these is pretty time extensive and dependant on how much resources people have to compile a list of findings/results from a prospective survey. What could the next steps be to get this going? [0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-09/msg00086.html [1]: https://emacssurvey.org/ [2]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983 [3]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/06/16/curl-user-survey-2022-analysis/ [4]: https://fennel-lang.org/survey/2022 [5]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-07/msg00152.html [6]: https://daniel.haxx.se/media/curl-user-survey-2023-analysis.pdf -- Kind regards, Wilko Meyer w...@wmeyer.eu
