TWiki-Community survey

Basic idea

We want to perform a survey with all community-members to get more insight about problems and needs to foster the community. The survey should be conducted anonymously, to ensure, that everybody can answer openly.

Ideas for questions

Beta Please note, that this list is far from complete or ready for final discussion. Please feel free to add questions or revise the wording rather than commenting.

Idea: Participants could choose, whether to take a quick and short or a long and thorough questionnaire.

• Demographics (Gender, Age, Country, languages)
  • What is your gender?
  • How old are you?
  • What country do you live in right now?
  • Which languages do you speak and read fluently?
• TWiki experience
  • Where did you already use TWiki? (company, governmental institution or similar organization, as an invididual)
  • Please classify your relation to the TWiki-community? (Just interested in TWiki, evaluating TWiki, competitor, TWiki user, installing and administrating TWiki, searching information all around TWiki, occasional contributor in the TWiki-Wiki, regular contributor in the TWiki-Wiki, Plugin-developer, core-developer)
• TWiki skills
  • I know how to use TWiki as a normal user.
  • I can explain TWiki to other TWiki-users.
  • I know how to configure and use TWiki-plugins.
  • I can configure TWiki as an administrator (system setup, installation of plugins, troubleshooting, ...).
  • I can develop TWiki-plugins.
  • I have already developed a TWiki-plugin
  • I can write TWikiApplications
  • I have already developed TWikiApplications
  • I can develop in the TWiki-core.
  • I have already developed for the TWiki-core.
• Opinions on TWiki governance (from "I strongly agree" to "I totally disagree")
  • It is a problem, that Peter Thöny, not the TWiki project, owns the TWiki-Trademark.
  • Peter Thöny should be the " Benevolent Dictator For Life". That is good for TWiki.
  • I do not like any kind of dictator. The BDFL-concept is not good for TWiki.
  • TWiki should be completely community-driven.
  • TWiki should have a commercial entity leading the project development like TWiki.net.
  • TWiki should have a non-profit organization leading the project development.
  • TWiki should try to raise funds to strengthen the TWiki software.
  • Raising funds dries out not-funded contributions by community members.
  • Individual contributors should be allowed to collect donations in TDO from their TWiki-related work.
  • I will stop contributing to TWiki if I see, that others are funded for certain acitivity.
  • I will stop contributing to TWiki if it is only for the profit of one company, i.e. TWiki.net.
• What do you mean when you say "TWiki"?
  • TWiki refers to the site http://twiki.org.
  • TWiki refers to TWiki.net
  • TWiki and TWiki.net are mostly synonyms/interchangeable
  • TWiki refers to the eco-system of commercial services.
  • TWiki refers to the technology
  • TWiki refers to its core engine as I downloaded it from twiki.org.
  • TWiki refers to all of its code, including plugins, skins, and any other contributions
  • TWiki refers to the TWikiCommunity
• How do you use TWiki?
  • I use it for project management
  • I use it for team collaboration
  • I use it to power a community site
  • I use it on a corporate intranet
  • I use it in addition to other groupware solutions, like calendaring, instant messaging, bug tracking
  • I use it as a unified platform for all of my groupware requirements
  • I use it as a knowledge management tool
  • I use it to manage the skills of the employees in a company
  • I use it for blogging
  • I use it for collaborative documentation work
  • I use it as a CMS to publish online content
  • I use it for collaborative writing of print media / papers / publications.
  • I use it for presentations
  • I use it as a personal morgue file
  • I use it for spreadsheet calculations
  • I use it as a communication platform to aggregate news
  • Other: (specify)
• How many independent TWiki installations are installed on your site?
  • 1
  • 2-5
  • 5-10
  • > 10
• How many webs did you create on your TWiki in addition to the standard webs (Main, TWiki, Sandbox)?
  • 1
  • 2
  • 2-5
  • 5-10
  • > 10
• Would you like to or did you rename the Main web?
• Would you like to or did you rename the TWiki web?
• Do you use nested webs, aka sub-webs?
• Do you follow a specific policy creating webs? Which one?
• What are the names the webs in your TWiki?
• What content do you deploy on the WebHome of a web?
• What content do you deploy on your TWiki's frontpage, i.e. Main.WebHome?
• How many TWikiGroups did you create on your TWiki?
  • 1
  • 2
  • 2-5
  • 5-10
  • 10-50
  • > 50
• Do you use LDAP in your TWiki?
• Expectations towards the community
  • I want to meet community-members on IRC.
  • I want to meet community-members over the phone.
  • I want to meet community-members in person.
  • I want to communicate with community-members through the Wiki in www.twiki.org.
• Expectations towards the wiki software
  • I want TWiki to improve the usability of the web surface.
  • I want TWiki to offer more features, that enhance the utility of the software.
  • I want TWiki to improve the WYSIWYG-Editor, so that everybody can edit wiki-documents like in MS Word.
• Voting on features for the software
  • Use Kano-Model for the voting.

Organizational issues

• All 36K TWiki-community-members should get an invitation to take part in the survey.
• PeterThoeny has offered to provide a list for sending out the invitations.

-- -Contributors:_ MartinSeibert - 31 Aug 2008

Discussion

Thanks for the initiative Martin.

The majority of the 36K registered users are evaluators who come and go. Best to address actual contributors, e.g. twiki-dev subscribers and TWikiCommunityGroup members.

-- PeterThoeny - 31 Aug 2008

Added some more questions ...

-- MartinSeibert - 01 Sep 2008

I would hope the questions would be answerable by check boxes, rather than radio buttons. Many seem like we users might want to check multiple boxes per question, instead of having to choose one.

-- DavidWolfe - 01 Sep 2008

I completely agree with Peter that the idea of sending out the survey to the 36K registered users of twiki.org is rather senseless. To say that that constitutes the "TWiki community" trivializes both ideas. I would present it also increases the chances of the results being random (i.e. meaningless). Why waste our time? I concur with the longest keeper to this community to select some subset that has shown at least a modicum of on-going interest and commitment. Heck, if anyone else actually requests to be included, let them.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 02 Sep 2008

Extended the questionnaire.

-- MichaelDaum - 02 Sep 2008

David: Sure, all types of questions will be possible. We plan to use http://www.limesurvey.org/ for the survey.

-- MartinSeibert - 02 Sep 2008

Martin, this is a great idea. As Peter says, it's important to try and target genuine users, and present them with something that isn't too arduous to fill out (first impressions are that there are too many questions above, but I realise it's a first pass).

Thinking about who should be targeted, the twiki-dev subscribers and TWikiCommunityGroup? is probably too small and specialised a set to be interesting. The TWiki Security mailing list might be more fertile ground; though I am never sure how many people actually realise they should register on that.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 03 Sep 2008

We should never abuse the mailing lists for which we have originally promissed that it would only be used for that specific purpose.

I myself hate when I subscribe to some mailing list for security announcements and suddenly start receiving surveys and marketing spam. What is an important survey for us is pure spam for many.

Some of the questions are heavily biased (the question itself clearly shows what the opinion is of the person that wrote it). A questionnaire must be neutral to get valid results.

I may be able to convince my wife to review the questions. She is a professional in this line of business.

-- KennethLavrsen - 03 Sep 2008

I agree, that some questions are too biased. But that is okay in this stage. I know, that we may not make suggestions while posing the questions and that there is no persuasion between the lines.

-- MartinSeibert - 03 Sep 2008

I find the two questions to be out of place in this survey:

• Does TWiki.net have an advantage in the eco-system of commercial TWiki services?
• Would you like see Certified TWiki retailed by TWiki.net as an industry standard for commercial TWiki distributions?

These are TWiki.net marketing-specific question, and should not be part of this survey. Otherwise it like we "give them" our user database for marketing purposes.

BTW, I just realized that we don't have a privacy statement on our TWikiRegistration form.

I have mixed feeling with "Which contributions of TWiki.net to TWiki do you value most", specially if it is not followed by "Which contributions of the (WikiRing consultants|Motorola|Sun) to TWiki do you value most".

-- RafaelAlvarez - 03 Sep 2008

I agree with Rafael and erase the concerning questions.

-- MartinSeibert - 03 Sep 2008

Do we need any TWiki.net-questions at all. They seem to be rather political for me. I would like to kick them all.

-- MartinSeibert - 06 Oct 2008

Yes. The survey is extremely biased and political.

I have a wife that does this for a living and has more than 20 years of experience in marketing research and I did ask her if she would helps us with the questions. This survey has to be built up from scratch all over again.

We will have to first ask ourselves what it is we want to learn from the survey and then turn this into neutral unbiased questions.

-- KennethLavrsen - 07 Oct 2008

Kenneth - exactly I'm quite strongly disinterested in the TWiki oss project being about the commercial aspects - I recon we commerce people can and should send out our marketing message in other channels - or simply by being seen to contribute.

-- SvenDowideit - 07 Oct 2008