Announcing Git User's Survey 2016 [was: Working with public-inbox.org]

From: Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 28, 2016, 13:45 UTC
Message-ID: <bb1ee52f-c4b6-ded3-19af-ddb7b65b376d@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1608281036460.129229@virtualbox>

Hello Johannes,

W dniu 28.08.2016 o 10:38, Johannes Schindelin pisze:

Show 22 quoted lines

> On Sun, 28 Aug 2016, Jakub Narębski wrote:
>> W dniu 22.08.2016 o 15:15, Duy Nguyen pisze:
>>> On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 8:06 PM, Johannes Schindelin
>>> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My point stands. We are way more uninviting to contributors than
>>>> necessary. And a huge part of the problem is that we require contributors
>>>> to send their patches inlined into whitespace-preserving mails.
>>>
>>> We probably can settle this in the next git survey with a new
>>> question: what's stopping you from contributing to git?
>>
>> Added to second take on proposed questions for Git User's Survey 2016
>> https://public-inbox.org/git/ae804c55-d145-fc90-e1a9-6ebd6c60453a@gmail.com/T/#u
>> '[RFCv2] Proposed questions for "Git User's Survey 2016", take two'
>>
>> Message-ID: <91a2ffbe-a73b-fbb9-96da-9aea4d439e5a@gmail.com>
> 
> I would like to strongly caution against putting too much stock into this
> users' survey. It is the best we have, granted. Yet I have not heard from
> anybody that they participated in the survey, unless they were also
> subscribed to the Git mailing list.

I tried in past and will try for this year Git User's Survey to be announced more widely than just Git mailing list (git@vger.kernel.org).

And I think it was successful; we had 6385 responses in the survey from 2012 (the one without analysis on Git Wiki) - the last one, the maximum of responses we had was 11498 responses in 2011. This is almost an order of magnitude more than number of past and current contributors ("git shortlog -s | wc -l"), and I think much more than all current readers and watchers of Git mailing list.

In 2011 there was "How did you hear about this Git User's Survey?"
question at the end (with 7022 responses out of 11498); most popular
answers were
 - news web site or social news site (e.g. Digg, Reddit)  1592 / 22.7%
 - git hosting site                                       1315 / 18.7%
 - other - please specify                                 1287 / 18.3%
   (which was not git mailing list)
 ...
 - git mailing list                                        230 /  3.3%	 
 - git-related mailing list (msysGit, ...)                  53 /  0.8%
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2011#35._How_did_you_hear_about_this_Git_User.27s_Survey.3F

In 2012 I have used different channels for different announcements; examining channel list shows that Git Homepage one was most used. This does not mean that people who selected those answers, or used that channels do not read git mailing list; they might just find the news somewhere else first.

Also, "Which communication channel(s) do you use?" in 2011, there were only 387 responders who selected git@vger.kernel.org out of 11498 in total (and out of 1018 people who selected at least one answer in this question). Though some people might though lurking is not use... https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2011#32._Which_communication_channel.28s.29_do_you_use.3F

I am not saying that there would be no bias in Git User's Survey 2016 responses. I agree with you that we should take caution when analyzing results of "What's stopping you from contributing to Git?" question. But it might be nor as bad as you fear.

That said, where should Git User's Survey 2016 be announced?
The ones that should be easy are:
 - Git mailing list, and related lists
 - #git IRC channel, and its description (and other IRC channels)
 - Git page on Google+
 - Git Homepage
 - Git Wiki
 - Git Rev News

The ones that would be harder are git hosting sites, among others the GitHub blog.

The ones that would be quite difficult are news sites and news aggregation sites, such as LWN.net or HackerNews.

Where else?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Jakub Narębski