Taking the Temp: The second post in a series about Survey 1
April 16th, 2008 by seth bindernagel
This is the second post in our series about the first Mozilla Community Survey and it reveals the mean responses to all the questions that we asked. You’ll remember from yesterday that we began with general information about the the survey takers. Today, we’ll review how the community answered the questions we asked.
First look: The Means
Below is a graph visualizing the average responses of the community to questions 1 and 2. We’ve ranked them in descending order to show the answers from highest to lowest score. You’ll remember that we asked:
- “I feel that…”
- “What resources and actions would be necessary to make the community more satisfied and productive?”
You should be able to piece together what responses go with what question, but just in case, please refer to the questions in yesterday’s post to see which goes where.
A few interesting observations:
Looking at the graph, you can see that each mean is above the midpoint of 3 (remember that 3 = neutral). Therefore, we concluded that, on average, the community is optimistic about Mozilla. Good news, right? We thought so, but here’s some more…
- It appears that most Mozillans believe that more active members are joining their communities. They agree that the communities are growing and Mozilla is helping to do that.
- They agree that it is easy to become involved in the community if someone chooses to do so.
- Most people think that the resources that are (or could be) provided to the community are helpful.
- Recognition is important and the Mozilla community members want to be perceived as more official local representatives of Mozilla.
- Mozilla can work on providing some quick ways to help the community with more resources. One that scored particularly high was “providing a Mozilla website template for community websites in different locales”. The other was “A visit from Mozilla to community members”. Interesting findings like this will help Mozilla provide better resources to its community.
The four questions that we see at the bottom of the chart are related to events organization and web hosting support. While the mean responses were lower than the other questions, please keep in mind that the means are still above the midpoint! In a forthcoming post, we will see that the responses to these four questions varied throughout the local communities. The variety in answers ended up balancing out, giving us the aggregated mean that we see that is close to 3.
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In our next post, we will investigate the differences between local communities using a statistics method called factor analysis. You’ll have to put on the thinking caps because we’ll take a little bit of time to describe a factor analysis and why we used it…but not too much. Mostly, we’ll just try to show you some pretty charts.
We hope to see you on our blog tomorrow!