[OSM-talk] Survey coming

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 10 January 2021, Mateusz Konieczny via talk wrote:
>
> I am also quite surprised by lack of any attempt to review proposed
> survey by community.

Note that IMO it is not necessarily a superior approach to design a 
survey through a fully open community process - or, to put it to the 
extreme, to have a survey to design a survey. ;-)  If the board wants 
to use a survey to learn more things about the OSM community (to "know 
what you are thinking") then they should decide what specifically they 
want to know and not someone else.

My concern was more to avoid missing an opportunity by making sure that 
the survey is designed in a manner that yields meaningful results.  
That is not rocket science and it does not require a large group of 
people.  But we surely have people with experience in that domain and 
an outside review of the design of the survey seems prudent.

In good do-ocratic tradition i should of course not call for such review 
without offering my own help with that (which i hereby do) - but as i 
have no formal background in social sciences and my statistics 
knowledge is mostly engineering statistics i am certainly not the best 
qualified person for that.

Another note on the blog post from 2019 i linked to - as Joseph picked 
it up.  The survey back then was mostly asking for free form answers 
and only had very few multiple choice questions.  Such a survey is 
fairly easy to design (you can't do much wrong by openly asking people 
to formulate their opinion on a matter) but tends to be hard to 
interpret.  With multiple choice questions OTOH you can make a lot of 
mistakes already by asking questions in a leading way (or in a way that 
is impossible to translate into other languages without distortion or 
in a way that tends to yield answers more influenced by the cultural 
disposition of the resondent than by their actual view on the matter).  
I don't know where the announced survey is to have its focus on of 
course (free form or multiple choice).

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/