Guix User Survey?

[Wilko Meyer]

Hi Guix,

Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com> writes:
>
> I think the easiest way to start, and something that's actually pretty
> effective, is to start doing annual surveys, e.g.:
>
> - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983
> - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/
> - https://tip.golang.org/blog/survey2023-q1-results
>

I think this is an excellent idea to have a means of mapping out guixes
community and values. This years curl user survey[1] asked specifically
what prevents curl users from contributing (p.20) as well as asked to
rank the "best/worst" areas (p.24-26) of the project. I think that
asking the broader guix community these specific questions could be
beneficial in answering the initial question of this thread on how to
decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors/lowering the barrier to
contribute to Guix.

Furthermore, it could also be beneficial to collect informations on what
hardware the guix community uses (running a hardware survey was at least
mentioned once on this list[2]) and what people are actually doing with
Guix (the "Guix and the developer ecosystem" discussion[3] could be
related to that).

> With a survey you can quantify these opinions and say things like "X%
> of people would like the current contribution process to remain the
> same. Y% of those are committers."

Right now we only do have the opinions of folks reading and actively
posting to the mailing list; which may be a way smaller group than
guixes actual userbase. At least I'd say it's safe to assume that there
may be guix users who do not read guix-devel, as well as those who read
this list but don't actively post to it. A survey could lead to more
representative results in that regards, as it may enable more folks to
participate.

As far as I know NixOS uses a hosted LimeSurvey for their surveys, which
should be free software; even though it doesn't seem to be packaged for
Guix yet. If there's a consensus that such a survey may be a good idea,
I'd be happy to contribute to it; even though I'm not familiar enough
with the governance part of guix as a project to get things started (I
suspect discussing this on this mailing list is a good start?).

[1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/media/curl-user-survey-2023-analysis.pdf
[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-10/msg00297.html
[3]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-07/msg00152.html

-- 
Kind regards,
Wilko Meyer
w@wmeyer.eu