Fedora Verified: What Does the Community Think?

[jflory7 (Justin Wheeler)]

@theprogram

What explanation can be given for two thirds of survey participants not answering some questions?

@py0xc3

it says the majority of people who saw the survey have chosen to not participate, and the majority of participants have rejected to respond to some questions.

This is attributable to the quirks of LimeSurvey with how it counts complete versus incomplete responses. Over the course of using our LimeSurvey instance, I have found this data to be misleading, and because we do not track IP addresses or set browser cookies, we have no way of knowing whether the same person opened the survey five different times, or whether five incomplete responses are actually five different people.

We have not published raw data from surveys before due to anonymization concerns, but the survey responses here allowed us to be more open with the results. In hindsight, I think we should have filtered out the incomplete responses in the data dump because they are misleading. I would not read into the incomplete response data too much, because LimeSurvey does not actually make this meaningful and useful unless we collect additional data like timings (i.e., how long someone takes on each page). This feels mildly invasive, so we typically do not use it.

@bookwar

I do not like the term “Fedora Verified” in general. It has a quite a lot of bad connotations for me, and also I don’t believe that it correctly explains the desired system.

I think that what we are not aiming to verify, as in to judge, whether or not you are worthy to be a Fedora contributor.

Absolutely. Whenever this conversation gets picked up, I feel like Fedora Verified is unlikely to be the final name. For now, it is all conceptual, as a way to get a sense of what the community thinks about this idea so far.

@py0xc3

The survey as such has been rejected, along with its premises/presumptions.

I do not agree. Is this data absolute, binding, and fully representative? No. I don’t think this claim was ever made. Was the goal to get every single contributor ever to engage and fill this out? No. Some people will have more to share and give an opinion on than others. A survey provides us some sort of structure to start collecting insight and feedback. It would be different if we were driving something forward with clear next steps and plans, but that is not the case here.

The discussion originates all the back to the February summaries from the Council Strategy Summit. This survey was an evolution of that original discussion.

@py0xc3

The low number of answers and participants are the sole means people still have to add their opinions if surveys create premises/presumptions that are taken for granted (but to which people disagree) and that can be only confirmed with any response (…when surveys become tautologies…). This number is expressive… but it seems to not matter and, at least so far, was just ignored in derivations. Again, all that was discussed already …

Would you be willing to join the Community Ops Team as someone who could better help steward our surveys? It came up in discussion that we used to have the Mindshare Committee gate-keep surveys, but this didn’t make sense with the committee’s focus on events instead of infrastructure. We were discussing ways to build more community input on how we design and execute surveys, and perhaps bringing this into the Community Ops umbrella.

Is this something I could ask you to join us and help out with?