Over the summer of 2021, the Fedora Council held the first annual Contributor Survey. The survey received 800 complete responses, which exceeded the goal of 500. We have processed the data, which are available for download.

Coordination of the survey was a wonderful community effort. Fedora Council member Aleksandra Fedorova proposed and led the survey effort with support from Marie Nordin (FCAIC). Many teams across the Fedora Project contributed, including: the Mindshare Committee, the Outreach Revamp Team, the Design Team, the Websites & Apps Team, and the Community Platform Engineering Team. Aleksandra and Marie presented a session at Nest with Fedora which goes further into the process and outcomes.

Over the last couple months, the work of cleaning up the dataset has been underway. This has been a slow process as there are just a couple of people working on that regularly. An example of “cleaning” would be folks who chose “Other”, filled in “idk”, when the option “I don’t know” existed. Those answers need to be integrated in order to have a more accurate dataset. We removed fill-in answers due to the fact that some people identified themselves, intentionally or not. As we process the data, we are noting feedback to improve the survey for 2022.

We welcome interested contributors who would like to help us reach a better understanding of the status of our community to explore this data. Please share with us your analysis, graphs, wordclouds, or any general feedback on the Discussion thread generated by this CommBlog post.

How to work with the data

The dataset is a table with 800 rows, a row per participant.

Yes-or-no and single-choice questions are represented by columns. Multi-choice questions are represented by a column for each of the choices. Additional choices were added manually by using the data which participants provided in comments. Such columns are marked with asterisk.

For example, consider the multi-choice question “Which social networks do you regularly use?”. In the survey you could choose the option Twitter. And in the field Other you could add also Reddit.

In the resulting table you answers would look as follows:

Mastodon | Twitter  | (*)Reddit
---------|----------|------------
No       | Yes      | Yes

Future Steps

The work on the survey won’t stop there. The team is planning work on a couple major things over the next six months before it is time to run the survey again. We want to dive into analysis as much as we can, and we hope the community helps out with this! Make sure to share you analysis with the community on the Discussion thread generated by this post. We also want to focus on sustainability efforts around the survey by documenting our process and how to run the survey to the Fedora Council docs. Last but not least, we are working to improve the survey for 2022. We will incorporate feedback we received, reword hard to understand questions, and remove anything that doesn’t give us valuable information.