[CLOSED] the first-ever Beehaw Community Survey!
UPDATE: RESULTS HAVE CLOSED! thank you for your participation—we've received over 1,500 responses which is quite a lot more than we expected. aggregated results and community creation decisions should hopefully come in due time.
hello folks!
with our backlog cleared and many new people around, now's a good time to do our first-ever Beehaw Community Survey--the first of what will likely be(e) many to come. this survey should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes to fill out, so we strongly encourage you to do so when you are able to. you can find it at the following link:
Beehaw Community Survey
the survey is comprised of seven optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and three questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. it also asks you about 17 possible communities we are considering and whether you would actively participate in them if made.
the survey will be open for approximately a week. we'll definitely close it before July 1, so please get your responses in before that date. it'll also be locally pinned for at least the next three days or so, so please mind that. thanks!
results will also be aggregated and posted on here in a summary sometime thereafter. no ETA on that though.
I typically avoid demographic questions for a lot of reasons, but I wanted to participate for beehaw's sake since I understand their intentions. Damn though. Some of those boxes are just filled with all sorts of loaded emotional yuck.
I don't mean it as a criticism. Again, I get why and the value, but phew... 😬
Do you think there's anything we can do to make it less loaded? I'd love to improve it to make people more comfortable
That's a great question. You all would have been better served if I offered something helpful, but I don't really feel qualified or knowledgeable enough in sociology and psychology to offer anything meaningful.
Some of us have really struggled with various aspects of our identity all our lives and so I think, if others are anything like me, surveys of this nature are inherently going to stir that. It's okay. It's simply life.
I just imagined something silly actually. I imagined a survey with user inputted responses where one could vote with a previously entered response or make there own. Naturally, there would be multiple responses that are similar but not the same. When the survey closed, the input could then be coalesced via AI into condensed groupings that best represent most folks. This might provide for better choices in the future for demographic info and how to best serve folks.
...erm.
That was certainly not very helpful. I'm just overtired while imagineering. I think I spent too many brain cells today at work.
So, user input responses while they can be great do tend to be a pain to cleanup because even if they meant the same thing, they might've written it differently, might've added other words, might've made typos, many ways this can get messy. I would not give this data to an AI nor trust it to not bullshit things.
I think for the most part - we did manage to cover what most people wanted in the options but we did miss some countries (Kosovo, Taiwan, Chile) because I had to type them manually and I just took a list on Wikipedia to avoid having to a lot of data sanitization, some things that we did not think about like the feeling of exclusion that some trans people had with them not being mentioned, some people had mixed feelings about the clear divide between white vs non-white, some people felt that more than one gender identity / sexual orientation fit them.
I think based on people's issues with this attempt (and future attempts, I imagine), we can refine and make things better for next time. So, if there's any question in particular that felt restricting in any way, please do tell, we'll get closer to perfection even if we can never fully reach it.
If you get ideas later, feel free to DM me too. No need to find the solution now. Take care of yourself.
If the form allows, perhaps a "not listed" option that would then show a follow-up question with a text box where people could suggest additional entries.
You wouldn't have to aggregate all the custom entries if it was too onerous, but if you spotted a pattern/some frequently entered things you could then include them next time.
It's great you're asking for (and getting) constructive feedback and responding so thoughtfully to it.
My suggestion is to try and get a template that has the demographic questions already setup. Having to add them manually is a pain for you and can lead to these slight glitches. There should be a few templates around as even from country to country they are pretty standardised.
I did initially do that but the problem came that ethnicity is just very very complicated (and controversial) so it was cut down to whiteness to make the most sense from a poc pov.
That said, for countries, now that it is done, duplicating the form should not be hard so now that the effort was put in, there's not much need to start over. I also expect that if I base myself on a template then things like Kosovo, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau would not be handled.
it's also worth noting imo that seeing the data come in, there was no major problem as unfortunately, our demographic is not as diverse as one might think (most probably because we inherit a lot of biases in demographics from Reddit). It'll be exciting to show the results.