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