Mozilla Community Surveys

Introduction

The Mozilla Community Surveys project is an effort designed to enable the Mozilla community to learn from the Mozilla community (nice recursion, eh?). More specifically, Mozilla Corp. and the Mozilla Foundation need to know what their "customers" (developers, end-users, evangelists, documentation writers, volunteer support staff, ...) think about various issues.

There is a blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/communitysurveys

We hang out in #surveys on irc.mozilla.org

Currently the people working on the project are:

Seth Bindernagel

Staś Małolepszy

John Williams

Contribute

If you have ideas for the project, please comment here:

http://blog.mozilla.com/communitysurveys/share-your-ideas/

FAQ

FAQs

November 7th, 2007 by seth bindernagel

How often are the new surveys released? We plan to release one survey every three weeks or so, but this may vary.

When can I expect the last survey’s results? The results should be published about a week after closing the survey.

When did the project start? The Community Surveys project lauched on November 6th, 2007. The work on the project started in late August 2007.

Who are the people who helped launch it? The project was initiated by Pascal Chevrel of Mozilla Europe, and Stanisław Małolepszy, who was a Mozilla Europe intern in August 2007. Soon after, Seth Bindernagel joined to help on the project. Zbigniew Braniecki (a.k.a. Gandalf) was also supporting us with his comments and great ideas.

How can I help? Glad you’ve asked, there are lots of ways to help :-)

  1. You can spread the word about the current surveys and the project itself.
  2. You can post on your blog about it, start a discussion on your Mozilla forum, or simply talk to your friends.
  3. You can gather and share ideas for new questions, and observe your community to help us prioritize the surveys.
  4. If you feel like translating a bit of text from English into your native language every now and then, please contact us.
  5. Finally, if you are familiar with the PHP, you can view the code and help us improve and extend it!

Why are there no text fields in the surveys? The surveys contain only radio buttons and checkboxes because we wanted our surveys to be extremely short and easy to complete. Open questions may easily discourage users from finishing the survey. That doesn’t mean we won’t use them in the future, but for now, we just want to keep the surveys short and sweet.

Why the surveys aren’t translated into my language? Probably one of our localizers couldn’t make it on time…but hey, they have lives, too! :)

It’s also possible that we don’t currently have active contributors in your language. Maybe you would like to help us out?

How can I contact you? Please use the Contact page.

The Genesis of the MCS Project

Staś Malolepszy spent his summer of 2007 working with Pascal Chevrel in Paris on a variety of projects for Mozilla. One such project focused on creating a survey tool that could be used as an information gatherer from our Mozilla community on all sorts of topics. Staś began grinding away on a web-based platform to post brief questions focused on a single topic and distributed to the community.

The goal was simple: for Mozilla to learn from the community by sending a series of one to two question surveys on a variety of topics.

Soon after, a few others got involved, including Seth Bindernagel and Zbigniew Braniecki. The team envisioned the surveys to be very short and personable questions that collected a lot of information.

Topics will range across a variety of ideas that will help the Mozilla and the Mozilla community learn from each other and communicate. Enough guesstimating! We’ll use this tool to learn how and where to improve.

We’ve also localized the survey into several languages so we can hear from everyone. If you’d like to localize it in your language, please contact one of us and we’ll figure out a way to do so. We hope to spread the program far and wide across the community.