As many of you know, CHAOSS has been working with a team of DEI advisors for the past 2 years via an internal audit to help our project center diversity, equity, and inclusion in all that we do. This process included a Community Survey, which we launched in October of 2022.
This survey was designed to get a general idea of the experiences of all our community members (Chaotics), no matter where they were in their CHAOSS journey. We also wanted to surface places for improving our policies and procedures to make a more welcoming and inclusive community. We asked questions about demographics, the ways in which they were contributing, their experiences with being a part of the community, and their suggestions for the future.
We will write another blog post reporting back on the results and our plans for addressing them, but in the meantime, we thought it would be helpful to share the survey structure with other open source communities who might benefit from a survey of this kind.
We chose to use Limesurvey to administer our survey because not only is it open source, it is a highly customizable and accessible tool. (The free version does have a few limitations.) We found that a tool like this one allowed us to fulfill the requirements that were important to us:
- Anonymous responses allowed
- Different kinds of response types allowed
- Hosted in a location that was GDPR-compliant
- Flexible presentation of questions
- Restricted access to data
We will be sharing some lessons learned from launching this survey at this week’s FOSDEM and CHAOSScon, so if you’ll be there, let’s connect! We will also take the lessons learned from launching this survey to our Chaotics, and iterate on this survey for next time, but for now, you can find links to the survey structure here:
Stay tuned for the data analysis of our results!