Community Survey Blog

How many people took the second survey and who were they?

Over the course of three weeks, 1,558 people took the second community survey.  We published the survey in 16 languages, thanks to the work of the localizers from mozilla-europe.org.   This step was critical for the survey because we wanted to see how the user-to-user support was doing in each local community and to what extent English resources were useful to each community.

Below is the frequency of survey takers across the various languages in which we offered the survey.

For five of the languages (English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish) we asked the survey takers to indicate their country of origin, since those languages are spoken in multiple countries. Here’s that breakdown:

Some initial comments:

• As you can see, 60% of the people who took the survey in English came from non-English speaking countries. We’ve done a pretty good job localizing this survey, but there are obviously people from other countries who speak other languages who are interested interested in the project.
• More than a half of surveys taken in Spanish were taken in the Latin and South America.
• France and the Germany dominated their locales.
• Look at the global participation!  We want to extend these surveys to Southeast Asia, Japan, and China…working with Gen and Mozilla China to do that this summer.

(Originally, the Community Survey project was targeted the European communities (as Staś’s internship project at Mozilla Europe). We quickly shifted to a more global scope, and we were thrilled to see so many people from other parts of the world expressing their interest in the project and the survey. Thanks for your support!)

Here is another interesting question:  how many surveys were taken each day when the survey was open?  See the graph below:

As you can see, the peak happened two days after the launch of the survey. Quickly afterwards the number of surveys taken daily stabilized at around 50-60, but you can still see the Christmas and the New Year’s eve when we got the least responses. We hit a second burst two days before the end of the survey due to a friendly reminder posted on our blogs.

Demographics

This survey was the first one to feature a demographic question, a lesson learned from last time. Below is an illustration of the frequency of various responses to our question, “Who are you?”:

As you can see, we presented seven answers to the demographic question and allowed for multiple responses. To avoid difficulties in the analysis, we then aggregated this data into three separate variables:

• End-users — those who responded that they were users of Mozilla products, but didn’t select any other answer
• Community members — those who responded that they used Mozilla products and followed the news on the Mozilla project
• Active community members — those who respond that they were localizers, developers, users helping other users, and authors of the support articles for Mozilla products.

Keep in mind that creating these groups was an arbitrary decision we made to help with analysis. We assumed that people who selected “I follow the news on Mozilla” were part of what we call the “Mozilla community” or considered themselves members of this community.  What do you think? Should we simply ask another question “Do you consider yourself a member of the Mozilla community”? And, what about all those people who follow the news Mozilla just because they follow IT-related or Internet-related news in general? These are the kind of questions we face every time when working on our surveys. Feel free to join the discussion.

Below is a look at the number of survey takers in each of these new buckets that we created.

19% of the survey takers selected the ‘I am a user of a Mozilla product’ option as their only answer (the end-user profile), and 49% additionally responded that they followed the news on the project (the community member profile). Therefore, 68% of the survey takers (19% + 49%) don’t localize, don’t develop, don’t write documentation and don’t consider themselves actively participating in the forums. In fact, we reached a very wide group of people who feel connected somehow to the Mozilla project and were able to learn their opinions on support.

Finally, let’s take a look at the structure of the user profiles among the survey takers for each locale.

And the composition of locales by percentage…

The important next step, which we will start to discuss in the next post, is to look at how each question was answered by these profiles.  It should be pretty interesting to see how end-users, community members, and active community members are answering support-related questions across locales.

Thanks for your comments and reading this.  More to come on the second survey soon.

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