One idea that grew from this thread about the number of developers whose jobs are supported by WordPress was that we should try to get more information about the WP developer community at large. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, that have never registered at WordPress.org, let alone been to a WordCamp or subscribed to this blog. It would be interesting to know about them, and also to give them an opportunity to participate in (and maybe even contribute to) the community.
I’m planning on including a link to a survey in the 3.2 announcement post. Because the email goes to end-users as well as developers, this is a great opportunity to capture some feedback from them too. We’ll open source the anonymized/aggregate raw response data and probably present some of the analysis at WordCamps too, like the upcoming State of the Word at WCSF.
The goals of the survey are:
- Gather data on the number and nature of companies and independent developers that use WordPress. (How many jobs has WP created?) Use this both for some static reporting, but also to track trends over time if we do a similar survey next year.
- Provide the community with a picture of the end users. What people and companies use WordPress, and how?
- Inspire greater participation in the community through awareness and the opportunity to receive more information.
It’s currently sitting in the wiki at http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Pjad/WordPress_User/Developer_Survey
What do you think? Any questions missing or ones we should re-word?
Andrew Nacin 11:30 am on June 18, 2011 Permalink
At a glance, looks great. Nice job, Pete!
Question 6 should probably have something like “contribute to WordPress.org (support, documentation, translations, theme reviews, etc.”
Bronson Quick 12:10 pm on June 18, 2011 Permalink
Love this idea Matt. It’ll be great to get some more WordPress data.
The survey looks excellent. My only input would be to maybe add in Q10 ‘I’ve attended a WordPress Meetup’ as well.
Andrew Ozz 1:37 am on June 20, 2011 Permalink
Sounds good to me too. Perhaps would have added 1-2 more questions for developers, something along the lines of:
“What do you find most difficult/most frustrating while working with WordPress? Examples: not enough or outdated documentation, not enough comments in the source describing how particular code is working, etc.”.
And then:
“What do you find easiest/most satisfying when working with WordPress? Examples: huge amount of open source plugins implementing even the most unusual features, large enthusiastic community, excellent expandability/large amount of core hooks, etc.”.
Paul Gregory 10:14 am on June 23, 2011 Permalink
In Q10, there’s no ticky-box for Trac participation other than “submitted a WordPress bug report” which reads a bit too specifically as “first post”. Also, there should possibly be a ticky-box for contributions to “Extend > Ideas”.
It seems that there is no equivalent to Q10 for non-developers. I would have thought that end-users that get the notification email or read the 3.2 announcement are just as likely to attend a WordCamp or answer forum questions. I think you should split out the “engage with community” answers from Q10 and ask them of both types of people.