Community Survey Blog

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.

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.

In our previous posts in this series, we covered demographic data and analyzed the community’s mean responses to the survey’s questions.  But, we suspected that answers would vary across locales.  As we continued to look at the data, we started to examine how different communities responded to the same question.  In this post, we will examine the differences in responses across locales to the first question about the overall health of the community.

First question: The overall health of the community
Here are locale specific answers to that familiar first question: how do community members feel about the community?  You can see that the responses seem pretty positive from country to country.

We then decided to go a bit further with that data we collected.

  One interesting thing we tried is called factor analysis.  When a survey has many response variables, you can run a factor analysis to see if any set of variables can be condensed into a new variable — one that is more easily explained by the common characteristic of all the original responses.  We did the factor analysis and were able to create two new variables called “Community Health and Dynamics” and “Feeling close to Mozilla”.

The above graph is a visualization of how we determined the two factors.  Notice how three of the variables gravitate to the vertical axis that we describe as “Feeling Close to Mozilla”?  Recognizing that, we decided to create a new variable to test, naming that variable “feeling close to Mozilla” since we felt that this was a common description of each of the variables.  The same goes for the horizontal axis.  Three variables gravitated toward what we have called “Community Health and Dynamics”.

With these two new variables from the factor analysis, we can test against our locales.

  In the next graph, you can see responses to the two new variables across locales.  But before anyone draws, remember that this analysis on the two new variables is directly related to the mean response variables we saw in the original question.  And, remember that all those answers were above the midpoint response of three.  Mean responses were above three and we felt pretty good about that.

From the graph, we can start to see that some locales have a slightly lower feeling of closeness to Mozilla (new variable one) and the health and dynamics (new variable two).  It is also important to note that some countries have much higher response rates than others.  So, drawing very concrete conclusions is hard to do.  Like all statistical analysis, it’s really imperative to understand the data before jumping to conclusions

Let’s focus first on Italy and Spain.  What might we conclude by these responses?  It seems that both Italy and Spain have responded with more exuberance than other countries about community health and dynamics and feeling close to Mozilla.  Remember though that this does not mean that Italy and Spain are “better” than others or more supported, it simply means that their communities responded with higher answers on the scale when compared to other locales.  

It also appears that the Russian community, on average, feels a bit less “connected” to Mozilla when comparing their answers to other countries.  Perhaps people from the Mozilla community can do better outreach in Russia to raise this response.  Good news: this may happen! We recently hired some new Mozilla staff to do direct outreach and community building in Eastern Europe.  In the future, it will be interesting to see if responses change after Mozilla takes action.

Interestingly, countries like Hungary and Poland had responses that were more toward the middle of the pack (less so for Poland).  They seem to have a pretty balanced opinion compared to other countries, feeling connected to Mozilla and that the community dynamics are good.

Time for some speculation.  Do cultural differences play into the results we see?  Is it unreasonable to think that different cultures would answer more or less enthusiastically?  We could ask the Spanish what they think.  But, we are not sociologists and are not geared to answer those questions — but, it is not hard to believe that they might.

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In the next post, we will look at the responses to our second question where we asked about the resources that Mozilla could provide to the community. We will apply again the factor analysis in order to reduce the number of variables and try to learn about the *real needs* of the communities.

This is the second post in our series about the first Mozilla Community Survey and it reveals the mean responses to all the questions that we asked.  You’ll remember from yesterday that we began with general information about the the survey takers.  Today, we’ll review how the community answered the questions we asked.

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!

At the end of 2007, Stas Małolepszy and I closed Mozilla’s first community survey and began the experimentation of analyzing the survey responses and drawing some conclusions on what we had collected.  We’ve finally reached a pretty comfortable point and are ready to publish some results.  Keep in mind that we already presented much of this raw data at FOSDEM in February for the community to see.  While there, we received a lot of great questions and ideas about what to present.  We took that time to conduct to refine what we learned (and conduct one survey and start creating a third!).  We’ll present our findings over a series of three to four blog posts over the next few days.  Please stay tuned and ask as many questions as you like.

Measuring the Temperature of the Mozilla Community

Introduction
Mozilla created the Community Survey Program to learn more about the ideas and opinions of the people who make up our community.  We are using this program to ask various questions to learn how Mozilla can improve.  Survey topics will range across a wide variety of ideas nominated by individuals, ranging from measuring the level of happiness and growth of the community to specific ideas like how we can make end user support better.  A number of people have also volunteered to localize the surveys so we are able to hear from as wide a range of participants as possible.  In this report, we will focus on the overall “health” of the Mozilla community.

Objectives of the first survey

•   Understand if the community is satisfied
•   Find ways to improve to better serve the community’s needs
•   Uncover new ideas on how to make the community happier and more engaged

Identifying the target audience
The target audience for this survey included any community member who has participated on discussion boards and who is interested in either the technical or non-technical aspects of the Mozilla project.  We sent the survey to the Mozilla “Active Members” list, a collection of roughly 50 people actively participating in the European Mozilla community.  We also did not limit who could see the survey, opening up the possibility that the survey could be taken by any community member who might have found it on the Web.

Expected conclusions
In order to compare the survey results against our anticipated outcomes, we created a list of expected conclusions. We thought that it might be interesting to compare these expectations to the actual results later in this report to how our process measured up after we were finished.  Here is what we created:

• We will learn about the existing situation in the community
• We will understand how people perceive current relations with Mozilla
• We will learn how the community would like us to improve in terms of these relations

Creating the questions
In designing the survey, we chose to create three “Likert item” questions that allowed us to ask very complex questions, rating several variables on an ordinal scale.  This question format also allowed us to keep our surveys short (a key to a high and accurate response rate in survey design) while still gathering a lot of meaningful data; and they allow for significant complexity in the questions asked and responses gathered.  For a behind-the-scenes peek at the survey making process, see Seth’s post here.  Below are the questions presented on the first survey (asking survey takers to rate each response on a scale of 1 - 5, from strongly disagree to strongly agree).

First question: I feel that …

• … I am satisfied with the amount of people involved with my local community project in the past year
• … there are more active newcomers to our community compared to last year
• … it is easy to become involved at some level (localizing, developing, marketing, etc.) with the Mozilla project
• … I am connected to Mozilla and that Mozilla is interested in our community efforts to work on the project
• … Mozilla is helping to grow local communities
• … the overall health (satisfaction, enthusiasm, leadership, participation) of the community is good

Second question: What resources and actions would be necessary to make the community more satisfied and productive?

• web hosting
• web storage
• more goodies (hardware, software, community-wide tools, marketing supplies, T-shirts, badges, etc.)
• helping to plan community meetings and events
• financially supporting community meetings and events
• helping the local community organize its members
• helping establish a legal entity (e.g. a non-profit organization) if necessary
• having a PR agency to help with press inquiries
• a visit from Mozilla to the community members
• providing a Mozilla website template for community websites in different locales

How many people took the survey and who were they?

As mentioned above, first survey was sent to the Mozilla “Active Members” list.  From there, it propagated through various networks and ended up being responded to by…

…1,156 participants over a two week period. 

Over that period, there was a 15% conversion rate for those who viewed the survey and then took it.  We localized the survey in 17 languages.  Keep in mind that we sent it to the active members list, which has roughly 50 members. 

For further analysis, we selected eight locales, each having at least 70 responses.  We chose these eight locales because we had to find sample sizes large enough where we could draw some statistically significant conclusions.

Some graphs to illustrate the community’s participation

Below is a chart of the number of participants by locale.

Below, you will find a line graph showing the number of surveys taken over time after we publicly launched;

And below here, you can see pie charts showing the percentage of survey takers in each country for languages that are spoken across many different countries.

For each locale presented in the charts above, it is interesting to see which country the survey takers came from.  You can notice that 64% of the surveys taken in English come from people who do not live in anglophone countries. This actually aligns well with the data we have about the Mozilla worldwide community. (See Schrep’s blog post for similar discussion.)

As far as the analysis is concerned, this has two consequences:

1. For the main part of the report, we will not be able to provide statistically significant conclusions for the communities of the U.S. or Great Britain. The sample sizes for these countries were unfortunately too low for the purposes of the analysis.
2. With the survey being about local communities, we will not analyze the surveys coming from all “other” countries and taken in English. We have no way of knowing which local community the survey takers were referring to when submitting their answers. Lesson learned!  In the future, we need to give more options when asking about the country of origin. The “other” answer was not enough.

Not surprising, French and German survey takers mostly came from those countries.  Other francophone or German-speaking countries did accumulate responses (like Switzerland and Austria), but due to the small sample size, we will only be able to analyze these two countries.

The last of the pie charts represents all the countries who took the survey in Spanish language.  Interestingly, only 39% of the surveys taken in Spanish were taken by Europeans, showing us how the survey propagated from our European “Active Members” community (the original recipients of the survey) to other countries in South America.  With some of those countries having really small sample sizes who took the survey, we can only describe their answers in qualitative terms.  You can read more about this in our appendix.

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That concludes the first post on the survey report of “Measuring the Temperature of the Community”.  In the next post, we’ll look at the mean response to each of the questions above.  Please stay tuned for more.  In the meantime, please start to give us some feedback.  We are eager to hear what you think.

On Sunday, February 24, 2008, Staś Małolepszy and I will be presenting the results from the first two community surveys that we conducted for the Community Survey Program.  We will present them to the participants in the Mozilla Developer Room at FOSDEM from 10:30 - 11:15.  If you follow this link, you can see the entire 2-day schedule for the Mozilla community at FOSDEM.

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 Community Survey Program is launching its second survey focusing on evaluating community-driven support in Mozilla.  During this campaign, we hope to learn from you how well Mozilla and the community in your locale are doing with product support. The insight we receive will help us determine what we could do to make our users more satisfied with the Mozilla support experience.

If you are interested, you may take the survey by following this link and answering the brief questions.  It should not take more than a minute or so.

The point of these surveys is to present brief 2 to 3 question surveys to our community to gather feedback about particular topics.  This time, it’s all about support.  We are also working hard to make sure that the survey is localized so many of our communities can respond.  Presently, the survey is available in the following languages:

• English
• German
• French
• Italian
• Polish
• Hungarian
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Ukrainian (new addition!)

Thanks to all of our volunteer localizers who helped translate!  Locales that will be published soon:

• Swedish
• Turkish
• Albanian

Thank you for participating.  We greatly appreciate the feedback!  Please send us your thoughts, we are here to help.

The first of several Mozilla community surveys closed on November 22, 2007.  We have spent the past couple weeks gathering the data and are now analyzing it.  Since we just now got the data, we haven’t been able to find out much, but here is some interesting information:

• 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.

Along with our first post regarding the launch of the project, we have published our first survey!

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!

We are very happy to announce the launch of the Community Surveys Project.

With this program, the Mozilla community will be publishing short surveys with the goal of learning more from its community about decisions needed to be made, and about ones that already may have been made.  We want to know

• your opinions about Mozilla events and projects;
• ideas on how to improve and evolve;
• constructive criticism of project plans and policy;
• and, praise about what is being done well!

The vibrant and enthusiastic community is what makes the Mozilla project so unique. And with the community surveys project, we want to embrace this community spirit as much as we can.  We’d love to see the community take advantage of this tool. That’s why we are choosing to publish short surveys on a frequent basis.

More on the functionality…The survey program is a website, where the content is updated frequently with (hopefully) interesting and pleasant questions. Hey, taking a survey doesn’t have to be a two-month journey you’ve been planning for a year! We want to make it light and quick. And most of all — interesting!

We’ve created our blog to be sure we stay close to you and to make sure you can easily follow the development of the project. We will use the blog’s comments system to gather your feedback on the project, the surveys, and the results. Thanks to the RSS feed, it will be very easy for you to track our progress and to stay up-to-date about the current and planned surveys.

As a result of a wonderful work done by our localizers, the Community Surveys website is available in 13 languages, including the very first survey!!!!

We hope you’ll have fun taking our surveys. They will be very short, informative and fun, we promise!