NOTE: As of July 12, 2009, this blog has been discontinued and replaced by the new Thought Delimited blog. All of the entries in this blog can be found there, along with new posts.
Do We Need A Better Way To Survey the CFML Community?
I just finished reading Issac Dealey's recent blog post (worth reading, by the way) where he shares some of the results from a survey he conducted regarding framework preferences back in September.
In the post, he mentioned how difficult it seems to be to get folks to participate in these kinds of surveys, and it reminded me that someone else in the community was recently pleading with folks to take their survey (unfortunately, I forget who, but I did take it). And I wonder what kind of a response Hal Helms is getting with his ColdFusion Web Developer Survey.
So it got me thinking: is surveying the community/getting feedback from the community a problem in need of a solution? Are these surveys being neglected because people don't see the point or don't have the time? Or is the low response rate more the result of a lack of publicity or poor technical implementation of the survey itself?
Any thoughts?
I've got no idea how to reach the other 90%.
Two possible solutions that I see: having Adobe provided some sort of digital community resource kit to every customer of ColdFusion Server and asking those customers to distribute the kit to every developer who codes against their server(s), or integrating community/collaboration functions into the IDEs (Bolt/Dreamweaver) so access to the community is right there to the left/right of your code window. I talked about the latter idea in an earlier post.
But back to the survey issue: it seems like even getting the 10% (the blogging community) to participate in the surveys is a challenge, and they're supposedly the more involved/passionate CFML users to begin with. If you can't get them to participate, there's little chance of getting the other 90% to play ball.
http://john.beynon.org.uk/2009/01/20/calling-all-c...
Cheers,
James
How do we attract them? I don't know - pay them to answer would be my best suggestion, even though that's not realistic.
Say the active CFML community is 1% to 2% of all ColdFusion developers, and say the total number of developers is just over 500K (as alluded to in John Beynon's blog post yesterday: http://john.beynon.org.uk/2009/01/27/coldfusion-is...). That would mean the active/blogging/interacting CFML community is at least 5,000 strong. John Beynon said his survey got about 432 responses, and Issac's got about 46 responses. That's under 10% and under 1% of the active community respectively. I'm sure both of them would have liked to have had a larger sample size for their data.
So again I ask: do people think the process for surveying the community (even if it's just the active CFML community) could be improved in some way to increase the response numbers?
I think it's also a publicity issue. Isaac's blog isn't widely read, due to the fact it's on RIAForge and isn't on a lot of the blog rolls. John's is better read but he's still not on my list of blogs that I normally read. I tend to think it's hard to publicize a blog survey, unless you're Ben, Ray or Sean and have a wider audience. Adobe could attract a larger survey if they used all of their marketing avenues, but past history suggests they wouldn't use marketing for surveys. A survey in the Developer Center, shown on the ColdFusion home page and linked to on the forums and other external listservs may get a better response.
Other than offering incentives and doing more publicity for surveys, I don't have any other suggestions.
Offering an incentive is another worthy idea, though one would hope that (at least with short surveys) intellectual curiosity about how the community answers the question(s) would be a sufficient motivator.
The longer surveys...yeah, folks tend to want to know they're getting some value back from spending their time filling out the survey.
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