Staś and I had a nice Mozilla Community moment last week.

Turns out, some people have been reading our blog about the Community Survey program.  So, that’s not really a big deal since we syndicated it on Planet and have been writing a lot about the first three surveys.  (Here are links to surveys #1, #2, and #3.)

But, the cool moment came when a statistician named John Williams from New Zealand approached me and Staś and offered his expertise for the survey program.  He’d been reading our write-ups and decided that he could probably add a bunch, noting that he really liked what he read so far and would like to help take the analysis even further.

Here is a quick bio on John:

“John Williams is a lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He specialises in teaching Marketing Research and has degrees in Marketing, Economics and Statistics.  He has been using Free Software since before the turn of the millenium, and is attracted to the consumer empowerment and related business issues that Free Software raises.”

John introduced himself and we immediately set a meeting to discuss his involvement. The meeting was easy to plan even though I am in California, Staś is in Poland, and John is in New Zealand. After our initial discussion, he did the following:

• re-analyzed survey one to confirm results and give some new insight;
• introduced new techniques to our plan, including “Principal Axis Factoring” to compliment our “common factor analysis”;
• created this wiki:  http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Community_Surveys;
• started a new IRC channel #surveys;
• and challenged us to think about managerial questions we should ask after seeing the results of our “satisfaction-based” questions.  Why did someone answer with a lower rating of satisfaction on one question compared to another person?  And, what do we do to fix it?

John also volunteered to finish the analysis of the second survey, which has been lingering for a while due to the two other surveys we have been conducting and other obligations like Staś localizing stuff for Firefox 3 and me working on the Screencast Contest.  (Did you submit your screencast yet?  You know you want to enter, just get it over with and do it!)

So, why did John volunteer to do all this for us?  His quote was something like, “Hey, I do this kind of stuff for big companies all the time.  It’s nice to get to do it for an organization like Mozilla, which is really making a difference.”  That’s paraphrased, but you get the picture.  What a guy!

Thanks, John.  We’re looking forward to your experitise and contribution.

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