Announcing the OTW Community Survey

[kristenmurphy.livejournal.com]

"What language(s) do you use in fannish or fandom contexts?" "Have you ever used the Fanlore Wiki?" "How did you first hear about the OTW?"

These are questions from the OTW Community Survey, a massive ticky extravaganza designed for one purpose: to find out how we can serve you better. It's going live today!

We want to hear from you, the members of our communities. We want to hear from users of the OTW's projects, from OTW supporters and members — and from fans, no matter what your opinion of the organization and its projects. We want you to tell us what you think about those projects and the organization, where you think we're succeeding or failing. And we also want to learn more about who you are.

The members of Internationalization & Outreach have spent most of the last year gathering ideas for questions from the OTW's many committees. Our goal was to design the kind of survey we ourselves wouldn't mind taking: mindful of fans' need for privacy, conscious of the international nature of fandom, defined in scope, and free from frustrating limits on answer options.

We're excited to finally open the doors and invite you in. Please bring your friends and help us make the survey a success by spreading the word in your communities!

The OTW Community Survey runs through May 2nd and is hosted on a secure connection at Surveymonkey:

https://de.surveymonkey.com/s/surveyOTW

OTW Community Survey

<a href="https://de.surveymonkey.com/s/surveyOTW"><img src="http://transformativeworks.org/sites/default/files/otw_survey-graphic.png" alt="OTW Community Survey, April 18-May 2, 2012, survey URL" /></a> <br /> <a href="https://de.surveymonkey.com/s/surveyOTW">OTW Community Survey</a>

And if you're as curious as we are about the results: we will be publishing them in aggregate sometime after the survey closes on May 2nd. If you have any concerns or questions in the meanwhile, please contact us!


Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Comments

[dreamflower]

I was 62% finished with the survey. When I clicked "next" a page saying "Bad gateway" came up.

[julia_beck (from livejournal.com)]

Heya, my sincere apologies for ignoring this comment -- I thought I had already answered you :/ It sounds like the server was down at that moment; it's probably too late now, but did you try to refresh a bit later? (That should have left your answers intact.)

[dreamflower]

I did try again later, and was able to finish the survey. Also, I posted about the survey in my LJ, as a signal boost!

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

For a survey designed to "find out how we can serve you better", it doesn't seem to ask for a lot of real feedback about anything the OTW does. It's more about finding out what OTW projects people have heard of or interacted with.

The one general feedback question is "If you could change one thing about project X, what would that be?" Why limit it to one thing?

And why so many detailed questions about the OTW website itself, which is a static, corporate-type website that is probably of the least use or interest to fandom out of everything the OTW does?

Also, please be a bit more realistic: this is much more than a 15-minute survey, unless you tick "no" on everything and don't fill in or need to think about any of the freeform answers.

[julia_beck (from livejournal.com)]

Hi Mary, thanks for your comment. The survey is (mostly) meant as an initial foray for getting an overview and help us figure out general trends and concerns. It's definitely not the end-all for all feedback, but a first step; so the input we're receiving now will shape and inform future rounds (although they will definitely not be as massive in scale as this one!)
In other words, we will absolutely look into asking more project-specific questions at a later date (for example, regarding tagging.)

The website questions, in marked contrast, are so detailed because Webmasters are planning a redesign of the tw.org presence for this year, so they had an immediate and concrete need because they are getting started on this right away.

(The 15 minutes estimate is the average we got from our test group.)