What people liked most

• Meeting other members of the community and putting face to names, getting to know people outside of IRC/Bugzilla.
• Getting to known the Localizers and hear their stories.
• Hearing about new projects like Ubiquity
• Staying together in 1 hotel, eating meals together
• Moz Café- gave an intimate feel to a large event
• Hallway conversations
• The social interactions
• “It doesn’t matter what you do for Mozilla, you can talk to everyone and no one needs a tie.”

What People Liked Least

• Too many sessions, couldn’t do everything, not inviting more people.
• More recording and video for those who couldn’t attend
• Bus Ride- Sorry shit happens
• The pacing felt a little too rushed
• More Down time
• Communication barriers, felt they weren’t fluent/comfortable enough in English to speak up in discussions
• Printed schedules
• Not “the summit” persay, but I was frustrated by the lack of forum for participants to chat in before the summit. I understood the need for the mailing list to be pretty low traffic, but having a separate, opt-in mailing list, webforum, or other method for participants to chat in would’ve been very helpful and probably have reduced the amount of questions sent to the mailing list and Dan directly.
• Well, besides the travel mess at the end, which was handled brilliantly but still was quite messy… For all the talk about getting some agreed goals for the next 2 years at the beginning of the summit, there seemed to be no follow-through or actual project goals set, or evey really discussed after the first day. That felt weird. The XULRunner breakout was a complete bitch-fest and made me feel quite awful… I had to leave
• Understand the audience- non-native English speakers
• There were 2 groups of contributors: “The Real Developers” and “localizers”. Unfortunately this is common behavior of developers directed to localizers, not Mozilla specific.
• The icebreaker didn’t work for me, since there was only one other person who had the same sticker as me, and that happened to be another Mozilla employee. Kind of defeated the point of having an icebreaker. The other icebreaker we did was an exact copy of one done at an earlier Summit and I did not find it that engaging.
• I was disappointed that some of the sessions that were initially advertised never materialized and in some cases were replaced by sessions that were more about “status” and less about the future of Mozilla.
• There was no time to enjoy the activities around Whistler unless you came early or stay late, which I could not do. It would have been better to leave some free time on one of the days so we could have actually been outside.
• I needed dinner on Monday night after a day of travel, and found that others shared my opinion – they were still hungry after the reception.

Improvements

• Have a 1 hour lightning talk session in the morning, for all attendees (i.e. no conflicting sessions), where every presenter for that day gets exactly 3 minutes to plug and summarize their presentation. No slides. It would make it more likely that people went to the right thing, and give people at least a taste of what’s going on across the project even if they are e.g. stuck in the Thunderbird room because that’s their main focus.
• Badges with names on both sides.
• Speed ear-bending: an hour session where Mitchell, John, Mark, Frank, Brendan, Shaver, Mike etc. sit at tables, and people queue up to get 3 minutes to bend their ear about a particular pet topic. Exhausting for them, perhaps! But maybe good for openness and getting issues raised.
• A location with more than one sub-seven-hour route to the airport? Seriously, well done to everyone concerned – a triumph of organization. (What is a “Breakout Session” in the question above?)
• more free time. The icebreaker the first day sucked, and didnt do anything for me.
• The wifi was splotchy in the conference rooms.
• The location was amazing though, and i wanted more time to explore.
• MozCafe was a great idea, and we need more fun things in there next time. (maybe two rockbands).
• i didnt understand the lightshow and why we spent so much money getting that setup and imported there. Dont need it next time.
• Overall, i loved it, and enjoyed meeting new people, especially the localizers.
• Maybe a designated block, once per day, where there are no sessions, no lunch – just deliberately-idle time? It’s hard to have to trade off meet-ups with interesting people against eating lunch or attending a session – explicit downtime gives introverts a chance to recharge on their own, and social butterflies a chance to flit around without feeling like they’re missing things
• a giant photo session for all? some paparazzis specifically assigned to put the people photos into mozilla digital memory bank?

Suggestions

• Community Directory

Summit Data

• Location:  90.3% responded that it was 4 to 5 (scale:  1 – bad, 5 – great)
• Communication:  82.3% rated communication about the summit at 4-5; 14.2% rated it as 3  (scale: 1-poor, 5-excellent)
• Conference facilities:  91.4% rated the conference facilities 4 to 5 (scale:  1 – bad, 5 – great)
• Break out Sessions: 67.5% felt it was about right
• Summit Length: 42.9% about right 44.9% though it was too short
• Session attendance: 66% responded that they went to 5-12 66%; 24.4% went to 12-15 sessions
• Attend again?  97.5%

Here are some charts to review as well that help illustrate some answers to the questions.

We also have all the “fill-in-the-blank” style answers to the open-ended questions.  We can post those in another entry, but we decided to keep them out of this post to help keep the length appropriate.  We’ll post that information later.

In this post, we will focus who took the survey and what languages they spoke. We will also take a rather unusual look into the way in which the respondents accessed the survey, i.e. we will look at the referrer information recorded in our logs and try to extend our analysis with this data.

Background info

The newsletter has been published each week for the past 6 months. It’s written in English and distributed through various channels, such as plain text e-mail, HTML e-mail, RSS feeds and Mozilla DevNews site among others.

When we started drafting the newsletter survey, we asked Deb to create objectives for the survey, as well as the example questions. The three objectives for this survey were:

1. Figure out who is reading the newsletter and how (what channels they use)
2. Understand the value of the newsletter
3. Learn how to make it better

For the first objective, we used following four questions.

1. How do you read the about:mozilla newsletter?
2  What other sources of news about the project do they use?
3. How did you first hear about the about:mozilla newsletter?
4. Demographic question (”I am…”)

After some thought, we determined that the second and third objectives were closely related.  We wanted to find a way to merge these into one smart question.  That new smart question would encompass the value that the newsletter provided (objective 2) and the suggestions for improvement (objective 3).

We used following statements for this question:

The newsletter:
…repeats too much content that I’ve already seen in other places.
… topics are a good summary of activity on planet.mozilla.org
…content is generally useful and interesting to me every week.
…should contain more news about Mozilla projects other than Firefox.
…should contain more news about third-party projects using Mozilla technology.
…should focus more on technical and software development-related topics.
…should contain more general project news, such as governance and organizational issues.
…is published frequently enough.
…should be localized.
…is the appropriate length
…should contain more community content and human-interest stories.

To learn more about the topic the newsletter’s readers find interesting, we featured the following open question:

“I would like to see the newsletter contain more content about… [ specify ]. “

We created this question because we figured that there was no way to predict all possible choices and present them in a list of a finite length.

The survey

The survey was open for 14 days during which a total of 317 responses were submitted. We distributed it by the newsletter itself (it spanned three issues), as well as through posts on Deb’s blog, and our blog. If you look at the responses submitted over time, you will certainly notice the bumps due to the mention in the consecutive newsletter issues.

Among 317 respondents, a vast majority were English speakers. On the chart below we can see which language versions of browsers the respondent were using.

246 out of 317 used an English version of their browser. Because the newsletter is published in English only, such a result was to be expected. This fact, however, has also a second meaning. It shows us that only a small fraction of respondents were using different locales, which most likely suggests that the newsletter as a whole is mostly popular among English speakers.

Here are some demographics:

It turns out that 87% of the respondents described themselves as the end-users of Mozilla products. More over, 73% (201 respondents) of them didn’t select any other answer related to contributing in the project. If we group answers in two categories: “observes” and “contributes”, we’ll see that only 31% of the respondents contribute to the Mozilla project.

See how the percentages don’t add to 100%? It’s because respondents were able to select multiple answers in this question, so that some of them landed in both categories. And how many didn’t? 31 percent in the “contributes” category means that, in general, 69% of the respondents described themselves as observers not actively participating in the project. This means that the newsletter has a wide audience of end-users and observers. It will be interesting to see in our next posts what this group thinks about the newsletter, as well as if they use it as their only source of information about happenings in Mozilla.

In over 75% of cases, we were also able to detect where the respondents came from to take the survey (where they read about it). It turned out that almost one third of the respondent came to take the survey from the MDC DevNews site (blog-like site where the newsletter is published). 13% read about the survey in their RSS readers. The referral data is presented in the chart below:

This was just an introduction to the series about the about:mozilla newsletter survey. In our next posts, we will focus on the responses to the main questions of the survey.

Localization is an important part of the Community Surveys project.  Currently, surveys.mozilla-europe.org is localized into 18 languages:

• Albanian
• Catalan
• English
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

Many thanks to all the localizers for their hard work. These foks have been occupied with everything that goes into the upcoming launch of Firefox 3.  Yet, they have still found time to help localize our surveys.  We really appreciate the help.

For this post, we will start looking into the responses to our questions. Remember that we asked the following:

1. Please rate the overall quality of the support for each product;
2. How much does the user agree or disagree with a list of statements describing the support experience;
3. Please rate the usefulness of particular content types (tutorials, screencasts, chats, etc.).

We can start by summarizing the means to each answer, typically the easiest statistic to interpret and visualize.  But, as a forewarning, the chart below is pretty long!

Darker bars are the mean responses and the thin vertical grey lines represent the levels of the scale for each question:

• ‘Lowest quality’ to ‘Highest quality’ for the first question
• ‘Strongly Disagree’, ‘Disagree’, ‘Neutral’, ‘Agree’ and ‘Strongly Agree’ for the remaining two questions

Perhaps it’s not surprising, but Firefox’s support was rated highest (our guess: because of its depth and completeness), whereas products like SeaMonkey, Calendar and Camino had a very high ratio of missing values (the ‘I don’t know’ responses).  As the support rating lowers for each product, the percentage of the missing values increases, which also constitutes an important piece of information.  60-70% of the survey takers didn’t know how to rate the quality of support for SeaMonkey or Calendar—probably because they hadn’t used support or the application itself.  For Firefox, we can say that its support was rated between 4 and 5, where 5 was “highest quality”.  NB, only about 6% of the survey takers didn’t know how to rate Firefox support.   Please keep in mind that every respondent was thinking about support in their language, so in our next post we will calculate the mean responses to this question for every locale.

For the next two questions, we should interpret the bars differently.  Each of the thin vertical grey lines corresponds to a level starting with ‘Strongly Disagree’ on the left, through ‘Disagree’, ‘Neutral’, ‘Agree’ and, for the rightmost line, ‘Strongly Agree’.  The length of the darker bar for the first statement means that, again on average, the respondents tended to agree that “the support sites loaded quickly.” As for the brighter bar, we interpret it in the same way as above: about 10% of the survey takers didn’t know how to react to this statement.

When you look at the average responses to the second question, you’ll see some interesting findings:

1. “Support in English is sufficient” scores lowest (between ‘disagree’ and ‘neutral’), and at the same time, it has very few missing values.  So, people certainly had an opinion on this one since there were not many “Don’t Know” responses.
2. Two to three other statements have neutral response means (the corresponding dark bars end close to the middle of the chart)
3. Six statements show that the survey takers well above the midpoint and reflecting agreement.

Is this helpful data if we see mostly “Agrees”, “Neutrals” and one “Disagree”?

Keep in mind that every person who responded to these two questions reflected on their unique support experience and then submitted their response. Also, remember that support of the Mozilla products

• can be accessed in different languages (and the quality of the support depends on quality of the localization),
• is often decentralized (each local community has its own discussion board),
• and aims to satisfy each users distinct needs.

If the cumulative responses were “Agree”, the means may still differ across certain groups of people. We can see that the “Most of the relevant support can be found in my language” statement scores high (respondents tended to agree with it), which is a good first step toward understanding how the local communities are doing in terms of the user-to-user support.  One interesting thing to note is the “The support sites make use of video” statement.  It scores low, but also has an outstanding ratio of missing values.  Could you argue that an “I don’t know” answer is close to “Disagree”?  If someone hadn’t ever seen a video on a support site, but was careful in their judgments and supposed that there might be other support sites where videocasts were available, they were probably more likely to answer “I don’t know” instead of “Disagree”.  In this survey, we assumed that an “I don’t know” answer equaled “I haven’t ever seen any of them”.  Therefore, we decided that the survey takers who described themselves as end-users were more likely to give an “I don’t know” answer to this statement.

Mean responses by user profile

Thanks to the user profile variable, we were ablt to split the cases and plot new charts for 3 different user profiles. These were community members (49% of respondents), active community members (localizing, coding, etc.; 32%) and end-users (19% of the survey takers).

We observe the biggest discrepancies between two extreme profiles: end-users and active contributors. The community member profile seems to be in the middle for most of the questions.   For example, end-users rate the quality of the support for each product poorer than the contributors (green bars are longer than the yellow ones). More visible differences can also be observed in the “Most of the relevant support can be found in my language” statement. It seems that active contributors are more enthusiastic here.   Why is this the case?  Perhaps, it’s due to prior knowledge about the products (and computers in general), greater familiarity with the technology, and a better command of English.  What do you think?

Two other statements bring forward even bigger differences in the way the end-users and the active contributors responded.

• “The support sites make use of video”

Why do end-users agree more than active contributors that there are support sites using video?  This is probably a result of what we have discussed above: respondents might have preferred the “I don’t know” answer to this question over “Strongly disagree” or “Disagree”, even if these ones would have been more accurate. We can see that there were nearly 50% of end-users answering “I don’t know” to this statement, and only half as many of the active contributors. Some end-users did agree on this topic, but some didn’t and we can assume that some of them selected the “I don’t know” answers instead of “Disagree”. Using this theory, we can understand why end-users scored this higher: there were not enough “disagree” responses to counterbalance the “agree” ones.

• “Users rarely ask the same question more than once”

It seems understandable that active contributors are more likely to disagree. After all, they’d probably seen lots of duplicated questions in the forums and Bugzilla.

In the third question we see that end-users tend to favor direct communication (IM, VoIP) over text-based communication, compared to other user profiles. We also notice that forums turned out to be one of the most favorite channels of communication for active contributors—and much less so for the other profiles.

Finally, here is the graph of the missing values across different user profiles.

* * *
In the next posts we will reduce the number of variables by means of the factor analysis. This will allow us to better synthesize the analysis without loosing much of the information enclosed in the original set of variables.

Thanks for reading this to the end!!

If you’d like to learn more about the newsletter, check out this wiki site.  Deb Richardson is the editor-in-chief of the newsletter and she puts so much work into it from week to week.  about:mozilla is written so readers can get a good summary of the key goings-on inside the organization and community.  But, we can make it better and this survey will help us to learn how.  Please take an extra 2 minutes to complete the survey to let us know what you think.  We promise it only takes that long…or less! 

Thanks everyone!

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.

Where did we get this idea?

The topic for this survey came from Jesper Kristensen, a Danish localizer, who participated in a discussion on the Mozilla Europe’s mailing list about new survey ideas.  He wrote:

“SUMO (support.mozilla.com) is a great project, and it is probably going to support localization. But the project relies on volunteers from the local communities. I think it would be interesting to know if the local communities are interested in participating in that project. [...] David and Axel speculates if support of Firefox only vs. all Mozilla will influence how much volunteers will contribute to the project. Maybe a survey could be used to find the answer.”

We took this idea and expanded it to include Mozilla support in general.  It made most sense to then contact David Tenser, the project manager of SUMO, and invite him to help us with the objectives and questions.  Kindly, he agreed to help.

Preparing the questions

Just as we did in the first survey, we kept the questions short to help increase responses rates while still providing valuable information to us.  After a couple of long calls and e-mails, we agreed on a set of objectives listed below:

1. To understand and measure how Mozilla is doing at support in the different locales;
2. To get a better understanding on people’s perception of the quality of support;
3. To find out how can we make Mozilla support more useful.

We asked four questions in total, three of which directly related to our objectives.

In the first question,we asked the survey takers to gauge overall support on different Mozilla products.  In order to identify support-related issues in local communities, we provided a list of possible experiences for people to rate on a scale from one to five.

Question 1: How would you rate the support that community provides for Mozilla products in your language? (1- lowest quality, 5- highest quality)

• Mozilla overall
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Calendar
• SeaMonkey
• Camino
• Add-ons

Question 2: How accurate are the following statements for your community? (1 – least accurate, 5 – most accurate)

In my community…

• most of the relevant information can be found in my locale
• the support sites have a structure that is easy to read and navigate
• users ask questions in the right channels
• users rarely ask the same question more than once
• the support sites are up-to-date
• the support sites cover well the most common issues
• the support sites load quickly in my browser
• the support sites make use of screencasts and tutorial videos to help our users
• new issues/problems with Mozilla software are quickly added to support sites

Unlike last time, we made sure to include the “Don’t Know” option.  When we closed the survey, we turned up with a few missing values in our results, but it was still interesting to see how they were distributed, and how they could be interpreted.

For the third question, we asked about how support content might be delivered.

Question 3: What resources make or would make the user-to-user support in your language more effective?

• Tutorials/How-to’s
• Troubleshooting articles
• Support available in my language
• Support available from a single site
• Screenshots
• Screencasts/videos
• Specific versions of support depending on operating system (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• Forums
• Live Chat

And, you’ll remember the lesson learned from last survey:  Next time, ask a demographic question!  We did this time.  Without a specific target for this survey or control of who would take it, we could discover a bit more about who took the survey by asking the following:

Question 4: What’s your involvement in the Mozilla project:

[  ]  I’m a user of a Mozilla product
[  ]  I follow the news from the project
[  ]  I help other users in the discussion boards
[  ]  I write documentation
[  ]  I localize documentation
[  ]  I localize Mozilla products
[  ]  I develop Mozilla code

We then pushed these questions live in Stas’s survey tool and started to collect answers.  What do you think?  Do you think the questions are composed in a way that will elicit information that will meet our objectives?  Your feedback is appreciated.

By the way, a couple of weeks ago, Seth described on his blog the process of creating the second community survey. If you’re interested in a peek behind the scenes of the Community Surveys project, you might find his post interesting.

In closing, we realize this is coming a bit late, but with all the things we learned about survey analysis and presenting the results, time was not lost. Now that we know a few more of the challenges we may encounter, we can publish much more quickly.  A big thank you to everyone for supporting our efforts and keeping us motivated as you have done so far.  We hope it’s been enjoyable and informative.

In our series of preceding posts, we excluded from the main analysis the countries that did not have enough responses for accurate statistical analysis.  But out of curiosity, we decided to present a short appendix to the main report just to see how other countries responded to our questions.  Each of the countries had between 5 and 20 responses, so it is more like reading the answers from a focus group rather than an analysis of volumes of data.  We used a more qualitative approach than we did in the report, but it’s still very interesting.

The list of regions we will focus on in the appendix include the following countries:

• Argentina
• Austria
• Catalonia
• Switzerland (German and French parts)
• Denmark
• Finland
• Great Britain
• Mexico
• Peru
• Romania
• United States

It is attached as appendix.pdf.