Committer Diversity Survey – Survey Related Feedback

[Sharan Foga <sh...@apache.org>]

Hi Everyone 

I'm following up on some of the feedback received in the Committer Diversity Survey. 

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/COMDEV/ASF+Committer+Diversity+Survey+-+2016

The last survey question was one where they could leave any comments or feedback and also give their explicit permission for us to quote or use their comment.

The follow comments were received about the structure of the survey itself:

1. I don't fully understand the purpose of the questions, don't seem to lead me nowhere

2. For question 3, being allowed to select only one choice is a little bit too restrictive since the reality is a mix of work during work time, and work done after job.

3. Question 1 is ambiguous and subjective, e.g. does a mailing list post count as "involved"?    Question 7 is not helpful without activity frequency information.    Question 8 is not helpful without a time reference (i.e. information and information flow changed over time - there is a strong correlation to Questions 1 and 2).    Formulation note: "Prefer not to say" is purposely different from "I would not use any of this to describe myself" or "I would not like having recorded something".

4. For a diversity survey, I would have thought you might included a question around the LGBT community.  You can add that I am a happily married gay male to the results :-)

5. I didn't see a line item for this, but I am gay. 

6. In the future, please capture nationality or country of residence.    Thank you for studying this issue.

7. Race is not ethnicity. Race is biological. "Asian" isn't even a race. I am disappointed to see ASF fall into this political trap. 

8. Future studies should include national diversity as well as gender and ethnic.  I am interested in longitudinal data as well and hope you continue to run this survey.

9. Would have been nice if there was a part about the incubator - whether people are involved (and how), what they see the role of the incubator being, how they see it progressing and so on. Perhaps also some about what  peoples primary method of contribution is (code, documentation, artwork, quality assurance etc) and what their education is (always interesting to see how education relates to their Apache work).

10. Very good initiative, may be worth pushing a bit more, day job role dev/qa/ops, company size...

We also had two comments where respondents didn't give their permission to be quoted. One was that they found survey odd and the other was from someone with multiple roles that didn't know how to categorise themselves as a contributor.

Overall the feedback on the structure of the survey itself was constructive and contained many suggestions that could be used to improve any future ones.

Thanks
Sharan

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Re: Committer Diversity Survey – Survey Related Feedback

[Rich Bowen <rb...@rcbowen.com>]

On 03/15/2017 04:25 AM, Sharan Foga wrote:
> Hi Everyone 
> 
> I'm following up on some of the feedback received in the Committer Diversity Survey. 
> 
.

Sharan, thank you so much for the work on doing the survey, and on
summarizing the results.

As with any survey, some of these answers feel like the first sentence
of a much longer conversation. It's a very tasty appetizer. I look
forward to the longer discussions that come out of this.

Some of the answers, like a request for an annual Apache conference in
Europe and North America, are intriguing. I presume it means that we're
missing a large portion of our audience when we publicize our events?

Each one of these responses that you quoted (well, most of them) merits
its own mini-discussion, and I hope that we manage to find the time to
do that. Alas, many of them lack detail that would make them actionable.

-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen@rcbowen.com - @rbowen
http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon