Guix Survey (follow up on "How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?")

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Guix,

I haven't had enough time to read up on every topic that has been
mentioned in the "How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for
contributors?" discussion as at some point it got quite a lot to
follow. At one point[0] there was a discussion on having a survey to get
a better picture on and quantify what potential blockers are to engage
with/contribute to Guix; which seems, if done right (as surveys have to
be carefully crafted), a good idea; especially with the prospect of
repeating it annually as a means to check if issues got
better/priorities in Guixes userbase change and so on. If there's a
consensus on doing this, I'd be happy to contribute some of my time to
get things going (would creating a issue on guixes bug tracker for this
topic be a good idea? how are these non-code contrib. topics handled?).

Before writing this mail, I had a look on how other projects handle
these kind of surveys, in particular:

- the emacs user survey[1]
- the nix community survey[2]
- the curl user survey[3]
- the fennel survey[4]

I identified a few key themes that could be useful for a guix user
survey as well. I plan on doing a more extensive summary on this later
this weekend if my time allows it, for now a loose collection of
ideas/list of what, in my subjective opinion, stood out and what most
surveys had in common should do to hopefully get a discussion on this
started:

- the emacs user survey specifically asked for elisp profiency; mapping
  out the Guile profiency of guixes community could be feasible.
- fennel as well as emacs had questions on which programming languages
  their community uses; in the regards on recent discussions on
  guix-devel on developer ecosystems[4] this could help to identify if
  there are any shortcomings in providing importers/packages for certain
  languages that may be used by guix users.
- the nix survey specifically asked for the environments and context nix
  is being used in; it'd be interesting to see where and for what
  purpose people are using Guix.
- most surveys had, some more some less extensive, demographic
  questions and questions mapping out how many years people have been
  programming.

Specifially in the lights of the original discussion/regarding
contributions:

- I think that the "Where do you discuss Fennel or interact with other
  Fennel developers" question of fennels survey should be asked for guix
  as well, to get a grasp on which platforms are being used to discuss
  all things guix.
- the curl user survey[6] did a pretty good job in mapping out what
  prevents users from contributing (p.20) as well as mapping out what
  areas of the project are regarding as good/which have room for
  improvements (p.24-26)
- fennel asked for "the biggest problems you have using Fennel", it had
  a "If you haven't hacked on Fennel itself, why not?" question as
  well. I personally think this could be good to assess potential pain
  points/blockers for Guix as well. Fennel also asked for "favorite
  features" which could be a nice way to map out which parts of Guix are
  popular.

Last, the nix user survey allowed free-form responses. Having a
qualitative research component to a survey could help getting better
results (especially when identifying problems in using guix/blockers in
contributing and so on); but evaluating these is pretty time extensive
and dependant on how much resources people have to compile a list of
findings/results from a prospective survey.

What could the next steps be to get this going?

[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-09/msg00086.html
[1]: https://emacssurvey.org/
[2]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983
[3]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/06/16/curl-user-survey-2022-analysis/
[4]: https://fennel-lang.org/survey/2022
[5]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-07/msg00152.html
[6]: https://daniel.haxx.se/media/curl-user-survey-2023-analysis.pdf

-- 
Kind regards,

Wilko Meyer
w@wmeyer.eu