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!

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!

After we present the findings, we will be sure to make them all available online so those who cannot make the presentation will be able to review the responses.

• The survey was active from November 7 – 22, 2007.
• During that time, we received almost 8,000 visits.
• 1,150 people took the survey.
• This gave us a conversion rate of nearly 15%.

Without much of a barometer as comparison, we thought our conversation rate was pretty high for an on-line survey.

The next survey will come out soon.  We are deciding the topic, given all the feedback and ideas we’ve received from the community.  If you have thoughts on what the content should be for the next, or any of the surveys, please do comment on this blog.

The aim of the survey is to learn more about both the current situation and the needs of our communities. We would like to learn how Mozilla is doing in working with the community, and hear form you where we need to improve.

The survey will remain open until November 22, 2007.

Take the survey and spread the word!