Brainstorm for New Survey: Contribution Experience

[AnaMMedina21]

Thinking we should find out what folk's current experience is with contributing, this will let us know how we can make it better and help us recruit new members

Will fill out more details later

[avillela]

One area where this applies and is probably the lowest barrier to entry is docs, so I would love thoughts from @open-telemetry/docs-approvers on this!

We might want to tap some SIG maintainers here too. Are there any SIGs that we know of that need some extra contribution love? This may be a question for @open-telemetry/governance-committee?

[svrnm]

Please take a look at open-telemetry/community#2162 as well, since I suggested creating a SIG for contributor experience, so this could be a coordinated effort eventually. This should not stop you from creating such a survey and I agree (very selfishly) that docs is a good starting point

[jpkrohling]

I agree -- the survey is a good idea to have, and we could even consider having it regularly. We have a list of contributors to the project via devstats, so we could target people from that list.

[avillela]

I like the idea of doing a survey regularly. Can you point me to how we can find the contributors via devstats?

[jpkrohling]

This could be a good start:

https://opentelemetry.devstats.cncf.io/d/52/new-contributors-table?orgId=1

[avillela]

This is great! Thanks for sharing!!

[avillela]

Related PR: open-telemetry/community#2162

[danielgblanco]

A combined effort on this would be amazing. I think it's possible for organization admins to see emails of all members as well (thinking about automating this), although that will be a subset of contributors.

Would the intention be to have an "onboarding survey" to see how new contributors found their experience?

[avillela]

Would the intention be to have an "onboarding survey" to see how new contributors found their experience?

Yeah, exactly - onboarding specifically around OTel contributions.

[AnaMMedina21]

Hey @open-telemetry/sig-contributor-experience-maintainers, the End-User SIG had brainstormed coming up with a survey to understand the contributor experience and ways to improve it. With the creation of the new SIG we feel like this fits your wheelhouse more and wanted to put it on your radar, we are happy to help in any way

[svrnm]

should this issue be moved then? or should we have 2 of them? End User SIG has so much more experience in running those surveys and accomplishing reach, so I would prefer to collaborate on that still

[svrnm]

A thought I wanted to have written down: it would be interesting to see if we can split this survey into two: a contributor experience survey and a non-contributor experience survey where the second is aimed towards people that wanted to contribute but failed to do so or stopped contributing. This would be helpful to identify some issues on how people get into our community

[danielgblanco]

Regarding two surveys... I think we can get into survey fatigue (although I guess we wouldn't be targeting the same groups). I think it would be possible to create a survey with an initial condition (have you contributed before) and go to a different section as explained in https://www.howtogeek.com/437542/how-to-create-a-google-form-with-branching-logic/.

That way only one survey may come out, with a message like "have you contributed to OTel, or have thought about it didn't get to it". This may be easier to handle and aggregate responses (some of them may be similar questions for both groups)

[mx-psi]

I gave this a try here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YlwHJlJjuaR4i8VqWf1eIOpT158TOHdLii8iC0ndJXc/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.wkyobsrv4abk My focus has been to also ask questions related to existing community contributors and not only newbies.

Note that we have a duplicate of this issue here: open-telemetry/sig-contributor-experience/issues/27. I like this one better, should we close the other one and transfer this one to the sig-contributor-experience repo?