[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Brian]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 2:18 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Part of my questioning the survey is because
> its design explicitly excludes the opinions of
> people like my friend, who edits under an IP afaik.

If they didn't include *all* visitors to the site then it really is a
biased sample. Collect from everyone, but also collect demographics.
Its the only way to do this right.

> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is this survey sufficiently accurate (i.e., accurate in a very broad
>> way) to serve its purpose? How much will problems with methodology (which
>> I'm sure Erik knew would be pointed out immediately) distort the results?

Being informal about a survey is a slippery slope. The risk is that
your conclusions simply do not follow from the premises, and thus that
you haven't actually gauged community opinion.

Since,

1) creating unbiased survey software is a one time cost
2) the importance of the decisions being made based on the survey is very high
3) nobody wishes to distort community opinion

it must be worth it to do it correctly.

Isn't Mike Godwin an ex-statistician? Pair him up with a developer and
they'll be done in a day. Probably doesn't fit the job description
though :)