Wilko Meyer <w...@wmeyer.eu> writes:
> 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 I definitely vote for having a free form field too, and also an extra one for feedback on the survey. It might not be easy to turn it into quantitative data, but if a lot of people mention certain key words, that should be both easy to grep for and very apparent even for a casual reader.
