Taking the Temp: The fourth post in a series about Survey 1
April 21st, 2008 by seth bindernagel
In our last post, we talked about the factor analysis we used to help interpret the data we collected from survey 1. Using that same technique in this post, you’ll learn about how the survey takers responded to Mozilla’s question about what resources might be helpful to the community.
Second question: Resources
The graph below shows how each country has responded to various questions about resources available for or important to the community. Once again, the mean responses (for the most part) are above three across most of the countries. It also seems that the best resource Mozilla Corporation could provide would be a visit form someone on Mozilla staff and a website template for the community. Great findings for Mozilla!
Once again, we used a factor analysis to further understand how these responses related to each other. With the factor analysis, we reduced the number of variables to analyze to three. The chart below presents the correlation between the questions (old variables) and the factors (new variables).
You can see how responses clustered around these new factors. The three hues of green correspond to three new variables we extracted, each relating to a different type of support the community might need. We can see that two first variables (web hosting and web storage) load significantly into the third factor (the lightest shade of green), which we decided to name “Websites”. The second factor, which we call “Events”, relates to the questions about events, organization, financing, and providing the communities with more “goodies” (i.e. Mozilla T-shirts, badges, stickers etc.). The last factor (dark green bars) is correlated with the last five questions about managerial and legal help from Mozilla, handling press requests, visiting local communities by Mozilla representatives, and providing an official website template for community sites. We named this factor “Operational help”.
Like last time, our next step was to look how each locale tested against the new variable we created from the factor analysis.
For this factor analysis, we put more emphasis on comparing the three factors’ scores for each country. Analyzing the factors country by country gives us a lot of knowledge about what what kind of support we should consider first for each community. For instance, a longer bar for events for Hungary does not necessarily mean that Hungarians need events support more than the Polish community. What it means is that support regarding events organization is more important for the Hungarian community than the websites support (the Hungarian pale green bar is negative). For the Polish community, website support seems to be of a greater value. It also appears important to the French, Russian and Spanish. But, we have to take the website support a bit deeper: what could be the challenges facing these communities that elicited these responses? Slow loading times? Outdated content or visual theme? Need for more hosting space? We have some ideas and now can ask to see what would be best.
We can also see that some of the communities might want Mozilla to help organize events. We know from past experience that events really help the spirit of the community. If Mozilla could help organize events, perhaps it would have a significant impact on the health of local communities in places like Hungary, Italy, Poland or Russia. Perhaps an upcoming developer day would be best hosted in one of these countries? Who knows…this is speculation time. But, these are valuable conclusions to draw from the survey.
Finally, we can try to interpret the scores on the “operational” variable. It seems that the communities from Hungary, Italy and Spain feel that Mozilla could try to make the community seem more official through different ideas like Mozilla employee visits, helping with legal issues, and providing official Mozilla branding tools like a website template.
We can try to look at these results from a different angle as well. We know that this survey propagated far beyond the intended audience of the “active members” list inside the European community. Therefore, we can assume that the more people who took the survey, the farther we extended from the active members list, perhaps even to the end-users. Consequently, the answers we received might show how all survey takers perceived their local communities, instead of what the original target, the active community members, might perceive as need. For instance, in the case of the operational support variable, Poland and Russia have the lowest scores on this factor. Could it be that many end users took the survey and they don’t believe that their communities need Mozilla “operational” help? If you look at their main community sites: mozillapl.org and mozilla.ru respectively, you might admit that these communities have a very professional look.
In conclusion, each factor exposes areas that are decidedly different and important to each community. It is interesting for us to see how the survey takers thought their communities would benefit. Because the factor analysis shows that each community has distinct needs, interests, and is at a distinct stage of development, the appropriate next step will be for Mozilla to speak with each community about how it can help or where help is needed (based on survey results). But even more important, we would like the communities to confirm and discuss our findings so that we know how accurate they are.
We encourage you to post your comments to this post. What are you thoughts, conclusions or questions about our analysis? Please let us know where you are from and what you think about your country/community’s responses.
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In our next post, we will summarize our findings with some conclusions. We’ll also take a look at where we can improve and how we’ve already changed for upcoming surveys.