I would not have thought the process was screwed up unless you called it a screw up yourself. In fact, I’d suggest that it was not, in fact, screwed up much at all. A much lower turnout doesn’t seem very surprising to me, or a sign of personal failure on your part (though it might be data that reveals a truth you are personally sad about).
I took the survey because I thought it was the only place to deliver a systematic and democratic expression of my preferences for whether or how to change the LW website (which lots of other people probably don’t care about, but I do) and I wanted to say something in my answers along the lines of “please don’t ‘fix’ LW with no regard for what made LW work as much as it did and thereby make it worse, and please please change the LEAST AMOUNT that can possible be changed and see how that works for a bit first, then worry about so-called improvements as second order steps, like if possible have it look exactly the same at the UX level for the first take, while being backed by a new system”.
If you want my free advice about the survey, the thing to do would be to set up a Google form “diaspora survey” after getting buy in from Scott and others to promote the diaspora survey as “relevant to my blog’s audience”.
Next year have a diaspora survey for sure, and maybe a narrowly scoped LW survey as extra credit if you have time.
The difference in response rates to the surveys is probably an important number in itself ;-)
The surveys feels like an area where good enough is the enemy of at all and thus the second order “good enough” is to just do the least effort thing possible, fix any last minutes things that feel extremely painful, and sweep problems under the rug, and claim retrospectively to have intended whatever the good parts of the outcome was, and blame everything else on lack of time.
If you don’t like Google forms because privacy… so what? It isn’t like people haven’t already had their privacy invaded a lot by Google already, even for these same kinds of questions a year or two ago, so what’s another year’s worth of data?
Then just add a small proviso to summaries of the process along the lines of “hey, this isn’t professional work, it is a hobby, so if you want something more or different done, feel free to send me email to volunteer to do tasks like X, Y, or Z”.
Scott/Yvain regularly added such provisos and his combination of wry self deprecation and doing something was really really impressive from a distance :-)
I’m one of the ~300 people who took the survey.
I would not have thought the process was screwed up unless you called it a screw up yourself. In fact, I’d suggest that it was not, in fact, screwed up much at all. A much lower turnout doesn’t seem very surprising to me, or a sign of personal failure on your part (though it might be data that reveals a truth you are personally sad about).
I took the survey because I thought it was the only place to deliver a systematic and democratic expression of my preferences for whether or how to change the LW website (which lots of other people probably don’t care about, but I do) and I wanted to say something in my answers along the lines of “please don’t ‘fix’ LW with no regard for what made LW work as much as it did and thereby make it worse, and please please change the LEAST AMOUNT that can possible be changed and see how that works for a bit first, then worry about so-called improvements as second order steps, like if possible have it look exactly the same at the UX level for the first take, while being backed by a new system”.
If you want my free advice about the survey, the thing to do would be to set up a Google form “diaspora survey” after getting buy in from Scott and others to promote the diaspora survey as “relevant to my blog’s audience”.
Next year have a diaspora survey for sure, and maybe a narrowly scoped LW survey as extra credit if you have time.
The difference in response rates to the surveys is probably an important number in itself ;-)
The surveys feels like an area where good enough is the enemy of at all and thus the second order “good enough” is to just do the least effort thing possible, fix any last minutes things that feel extremely painful, and sweep problems under the rug, and claim retrospectively to have intended whatever the good parts of the outcome was, and blame everything else on lack of time.
If you don’t like Google forms because privacy… so what? It isn’t like people haven’t already had their privacy invaded a lot by Google already, even for these same kinds of questions a year or two ago, so what’s another year’s worth of data?
Then just add a small proviso to summaries of the process along the lines of “hey, this isn’t professional work, it is a hobby, so if you want something more or different done, feel free to send me email to volunteer to do tasks like X, Y, or Z”.
Scott/Yvain regularly added such provisos and his combination of wry self deprecation and doing something was really really impressive from a distance :-)