Hi Galaxy List!
I was directed to post here about starting discussion / giving feedback for
the aforementioned survey! I gave some feedback in the UKRSE slack and will
share here, and anyone interested to chat more can follow up.
So I started but didn't finish because I found the survey couldn't capture
the nuance of my experience. As a first observation, it asks / implies for
me to comment on a current open source project, which assumes that 1. I
have only one, and 2. my most recent experience can capture all my
experiences. I think what I would want to be able to say is that I'm
working on N projects currently, and then in those projects, there are some
number of positive and some number of negative experiences. And then maybe
I'd want to be able to answer a question about a range of OSS projects I've
worked on in the past (e.g., 1-5, 5-10, etc.). That can somewhat capture a
person's experience level with different communities, because (albeit
problematically) the experience varies hugely! Also, the roles on the
projects vary. I've definitely been on the gamut of maintainer to
contributor, and I think there are different kinds of interactions you get
from both of those (e.g., as a maintainer even when you are in a position
of power the negative experiences tend to be people being displeased,
disagreeing, or even threatening, and as a contributor it's more likely to
be treated differently based on a demographic. So - I think it would be
good if the survey could capture these experiences. I felt like I was
leaving out most of my life experience to just be commenting on one recent
project.
I continued on with this project, but then next, I found I didn't know how
to answer because there were questions of the format "Do you do X more than
you'd like to" with "yes" and "no" - and I wanted to answer "I think I do
just the right amount of this." So I answered "no." But then the followup
was assuming that "no" meant I wanted to do more - I didn't know how to
answer.
I don't know the underlying goals of the data collection so I can't comment
beyond that, but if someone wants to chat about that (and discuss more
ideas for how to ask the questions etc). I just wanted to start the
discussion and offer feedback. I'm so glad you are working on this because
it's such an important topic for our community! I've had projects that have
given me immense joy and others the complete opposite - and it would be
interesting to unwrap that.
Best,
Vanessa
