seth’s blog

Staś Malolepszy spent his summer working with Pascal Chevrel in Paris on a variety of projects for Mozilla.  One such project focused on creating a survey tool that could be used as an information gatherer from our Mozilla community on all sorts of topics.  Staś began grinding away on a web-based platform to post brief questions focused on a single topic and distributed to the community.  The goal was simple:  for Mozilla to learn from the community by sending a series of one to two question surveys on a variety of topics.

I got involved because Pascal suggested to Staś that he contact me for both input on what we should ask and help with forming the questions.  I agreed.  We envisioned these to be very short surveys that collect a lot of information.  A commonly used technique in survey design is to ask the survey takers one question where they rate several possible responses on a scale of something like one to five.  We used this technique in our first survey and some other ideas to craft our first two questions.  And, working with Staś who was in Poland was both a pleasure and a lot of fun.

This week, we’ll send out our first survey to understand how active participants of Mozilla’s community think and feel about the community.  It might be best described like taking a temperature of the community and then seeing what we learn and how we can do better.  I personally am curious to hear how Mozilla is doing in building and serving its community.  My guess is that we’re somewhere in the middle of the road.  We probably do some things well and we could probably do other things much better.  But enough guesstimating!  We’ll use this tool to learn how and where to improve.

We’ve also localized the survey into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Turkish and Albanian.  If you’d like to localize it in your language, please email me and we’ll figure out a way to do so.  Our next step will be to spread it far and wide.  We’ll see what the response rate on our first survey will be and this will give us some guess about what to expect going forward.