[Events] Gearing up for WMF Hackathon exit survey

[Nick Gwynne]

Inline responses get bloated after a while, so I'm going to just respond up
here.

Definitely put name and email address at the end, as well as age. There are
actually independent reasons to ask for identifying information last (as
long as they are optional).

OS people used is good, including version (in case people don't think to
naturally include that). I'd probably make this two separate questions, for
ease of analysis. Additionally, I looked at it and I think that splitting
the wiki contributing and open source questions into two each would be a
good idea. For the OpenHatch question, why specify that it was when the
friend had heard about it? Why not say "How likely would you be to
recommend that someone go to an OpenHatch event, if it were occurring near
them?" General survey notes: If you give prompts, it will heavily bias
people. Make sure you cover all the relevant things, unless you are okay
with getting a weirdly biased sample (ie: "Oh, people really liked to *editing
a wiki, writing to a mailing list, commenting on bug reports, submitting a
patch, reviewing others' code*, that's weird...")

More potential questions:

   - Initial level of participation:
      - Have you ever done wiki editing before?
      - Have you ever contributed to an Open Source project before?
   - Follow up to "what was your favorite part?" would be "Which of these
   did you not even know about?", a checklist item.
   - While firsts are good, I think asking additional questions about what
   they did at the hackathon would be useful: "What was the main thing you did
   at the hackathon?"

Hope this is helpful, and let me know if I can assist in any other way (or
with more questions/feedback).

-Nick

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 5:21 PM, Asheesh Laroia <lists at asheesh.org> wrote:

> Excerpts from Nick Gwynne's message of Tue Jul 24 14:01:33 -0400 2012:
> > Typically, you want to ask demographic questions at the end of the
> survey,
> > to avoid biasing things. You also might want age, especially if you want
> to
> > make some of the specific claims about who you were getting to contribute
> > to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects for the first time (I know the
> age
> > range was a surprise to me).
>
> Age is an interesting question!
>
> Would you count "name" and "email address" as demographic questions? If so,
> I can move them to the end.
>
> > I edited the document according little bit, but it mostly looks good. I'd
> > say one of the other major things you might consider is a battery of more
> > specific and detailed questions. If you send it out as is, do make sure
> you
> > indicate that it shouldn't take very long (give a rough estimate of
> time),
> > as this will increase your response rate.
>
> re: specific questions: It occurs to me now I could ask what OS people
> used.
>
> > I'm happy to generate some more specific questions, but I'm not sure how
> > fruitful that would be. Let me know.
>
> Well, if you have any ideas, even random ones that might push my thinking
> in
> a useful direction, that'd be great.
>
> (Current status: Waiting on Qualtrics account, so I have some time.)
>
> -- Asheesh.
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