| spotz_ | So an interesting thing we're going to do in the CentOS postevent survey is ask timezone vs where you at | 15:56 |
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| fungi | that's an interesting idea, similar to asking about global region i guess | 16:08 |
| fungi | however, it only gives you coarse longitudinal reference, not latitudinal of course | 16:08 |
| fungi | and some locations have multiple available timezones too | 16:09 |
| fungi | for example, azerbaijan/reykjavik are in very different parts of the globe but share a time zone | 16:11 |
| fungi | this goes back to asking questions which we assume are proxies for the thing we want to know, rather than actually asking what we want to know | 16:12 |
| fungi | unless we really want to know time zones in order to better inform things like convenience of community meeting times and their impact on global diversity of participants | 16:13 |
| fungi | if that was previously the reason for asking about country of residence, then i agree it's much better to ask about time zones | 16:13 |
| spotz_ | Oh true I was thinking of it more for timezone coordination vs more of the location | 16:20 |
| fungi | i have a feeling the original reason we asked for country of residence was in order to attempt to gauge the global diversity of the projects over time and efficacy of our attempts to engage people in specific countries or regions, but that's pretty general/vague | 16:22 |
| fungi | also self selection bias plays hard into any ability to use survey results for demographic measurement | 16:22 |
| fungi | for measuring diversity, we're better off using other sorts of data collection, not survey questions | 16:23 |
| spotz_ | Yeah and then the where you live vs where you're from | 16:25 |
| spotz_ | But again it could also have been to get an idea for where folks were for meeting time reasons to see if we were excluding people because of time | 16:26 |
| fungi | i mean, the usa census bureau makes a go of it because they shoot for a very high percentage of coverage of the total resident population. we're more like "hey you should take this survey, it's cool and will help us help you" | 16:26 |
| fungi | we don't get anywhere near a majority of community members taking the survey, much less complete coverage | 16:27 |
| spotz_ | Nope I'm happy if we get 1% at this point | 16:28 |
| fungi | i do agree asking about time zones is a good idea, and probably more directly useful for us and other community leadership than asking where people live | 16:28 |
| fungi | as long as we present the information in context, that it's neither a statistically representative sample nor unbiased/controlled population surveyed | 16:29 |
| fungi | "people who took the survey reported spending the majority of their time in these timezones, ranked by respondent count..." | 16:30 |
| fungi | something like that | 16:31 |
| fungi | which could simply mean we did a better job of convincing people in those timezones to take the survey | 16:31 |
| fungi | what's probably more useful is "people in these timezones reported the greatest percentage of challenges participating" | 16:32 |
| fungi | and while everyone can probably already guess what timezones those will be, having data is better than having guesses | 16:33 |
| spotz_ | You're a good word smith:) | 16:38 |
| fungi | if i am, it's only because i've struggled with the written word my entire life (i used to get all my textbooks on variable-speed cassette through the state library for the blind) | 17:13 |
| fungi | i have a tendency to read and re-read and over-edit everything i write because i'm extremely self-conscious about it | 17:14 |
| fungi | which makes me a very slow writer (i also read painfully slowly) | 17:15 |
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