[OSM-talk] online survey about the OSM community

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 23/08/2014, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
> In an ideal world the way to get a proper random sample would be to select
> OSM mappers randomly then message them.  Hopefully you'd get better than
> 90% response rate to keep it statistically meaningful.
> Reality is you might be lucky to obtain a 2% response.  So the next best
> thing is OSM-talk and hopefully he'll get the 1,000 responses which he
> needs to make it statistically meaningful.

Remember that we're sending emails and that the task can be automated,
so a 2% response rate isn't really an issue. And it's much better to
individually contact a uniformly random sample than to globally
contact a biased sample (only a particular kind of contributor follows
mailing lists). As a added bonus of contacting individually, you
already know the person's mapping profile.

Here are a few proposed guidelines to keep things in check though :
 * treat a survey like an import: it should be community-reviewed and
accepted before going ahead. Be transparent, be usefull, be well
writen, be multilingual, etc.
* set target request and response counts ahead of time, and stop
sending requests whenever one of the counts is reached
* provide a way to opt-out any future survey via you osm account

Any other do's and don't ?