Taking the Temp: Conclusions
April 29th, 2008 by seth bindernagel
Last week, we posted a series of articles dissecting the results from the first Community Survey. In this post, we’ll discuss our conclusions and then follow with one last post that will serve as an appendix to the series that we’ve written.
If you remember from the beginning, we talked about what we had hoped to learn from this exercise. We’ve listed below a few expectations, and underneath each goal, what we discovered by conducting the survey.
- We will learn about the situation in the community
I think it’s fair to say that we accomplished this goal. With our factor analyses and other descriptive statistics, we were able to draw some conclusions. We found some already known and some new areas where Mozilla might consider supporting the community. We also noticed that a lot of cross-cultural differences came into play. Countries and culture are naturally different and will answer differently.
- We will understand how people perceive the relationship with Mozilla
Overall, it seems that the relationship with Mozilla is good. We looked across all the responses and saw average answers consistently above the neutral midpoint. We also learned more about what each locale expects in support from Mozilla. The next step will be for Mozilla to initiate conversation with communities to discuss the findings.
- We will learn what they would like us to do to improve
Perhaps most important, we learned about areas where we might be able to improve. One specific finding was creating website templates for new communities. A website template adds legitimacy to new communities and provides a valuable tool for people to use to get started quickly. From Mozilla’s perspective, it helps establish a global brand by having consistent templates with messaging for the communities to use. Mozilla can investigate if this is possible.
In addition to revisiting the goals of this survey, we also learned a couple lessons for next time around. Here they are.
- Include “Don’t know” option
Did anyone notice that in the questions, we did not include a “Don’t Know” option? We should have so people were not forced to answer something they may not have known about. We will do this in all surveys going forward.
- Always include a “Demographic” question
After the survey closed, we found that we had collected a ton of data, but lacked any demographic information because we had no idea that so many people would take the survey. We thought only 50 or so would take it and they were “active members” of our community. Without restricting who can take the surveys, we will always add a demographic question (or few) to have a good understanding of exactly who is taking the survey.
In conclusion, our first survey with the Community Survey program had a lot of great findings, but also has room for improvement. We learned so much about our community, and a lot about what we have to do for the future.
The Community Survey Program is meant for the community, so if you have a topic for a survey, please nominate it. (If we select you, we’ll send you a t-shirt!) Future survey topics will (or have already) include(d) support, Firefox 3, conference participation, and more.