We are conducting this survey to improve our understanding of the community and better support various teams. This year we have questions from the Nix Team, the StdEnv Team, the Steering Committee, and the Foundation which will help inform the work they do for the project.
As always, the survey is anonymous. Aggregated statistics and major findings will be published on Discourse.
Check out the announcements and results from past years:
Specifically, should âAre you the one that made that decision?â also be Yes/No, and is it really meant to follow âDo you consider Nix part of your regular toolset?â and not, maybe, âDoes your workplace use Nix?â
Thanks for calling this out @rhendric. The workplace question was supposed to be first. I have re-ordered the questions and it should be fixed now.
As for the question types, yeah it probably should have been a boolean Yes/No question. Unfortunately, once the survey starts, it cannot be stopped without resetting everything.
Would love if the survey can show how many people have already answered so far and optionally how many people are answering now live, and how long before the survery ends.
I realised I couldâve added this as an answer to the last question in the survery but I had this thought immediately after I hit submit, so maybe allow a grace period to be able to edit the response, like 5-10 mins if possible.
I donât think is natively possibly but maybe if someone was to write a plugin for limesurvey.
There might be a way to do this in the future based on this thread. However we would have to check that enabling these options would maintain anonymity. Good idea!
Thanks for running this. It was easy and fast to complete!
One accessibility issue: Below is a contrast test for the blue elements on the page, including highlighted text and selected items.
I was viewing in white-on-black using Dark Reader which makes the text color more legible, but I noticed the problem because I still had trouble seeing at a glance which radio buttons and checkboxes Iâd already selected.
As is, a survey participant with reduced vision will have difficulty reading the light blue text.
A question asking people view on the SC, e.g, if they are doing a good job or not, etc, etc would have been nice. Governance related questions in general.
One can be a (university) student while being employed though. But i would agree that for a lot of questions it would be nice. Like âif use_nix_at_work => show related questionsâ.
I filled the survey because I hope more data will help, but all the while I felt it just isnât a very good survey. I donât have time to be fully specific about everything right now, but few points:
Too long, perhaps divide in groups so people can skip parts theyâre not interested in
answer selection types are weird. radio buttons where multiple selection makes sense, text box where radio button would have been better etc
sometimes too broad, sometimes way too specific, it causes confusion on what I should expect from the next question and makes my brain work more to search for what answer I should be giving. Question framing can better be improved, especially for non-native speakers
Low contrast (already mentioned)
Scrolling on phone is broken for ranking drag/drop type questions if both sides are visibally full of options
At the risk of being doomed to death, I wonder, only out of ignorance, what benefit has gender-related questions brought forth to said members of the community. Iâm not saying these questions donât benefit anyone, Iâm just unaware of those benefits, and thus keep wondering why these questions are ranked so very high up on such a long survey.
Regardless of my personal misgivings, thank you for taking time to work on this. I understand it is significant work and helps benefit the community at large, and tI hope more people fill it out.
Hey all. Sorry for the lag. I was busy as a during NixCon and needed a couple days to recharge.
oof thanks for pointing that out. Will need to fix that for next year.
While this is true, I recall being advised by @fricklerhandwerk against conditionals (check me on this). And after having done it for the NixCon 2025 survey, I can tell you itâs a pain. However, one thing I think we did better on the NixCon survey is to group questions onto different pages. This seems like the best way to go in the future to balance out ease of survey setup and processing along with user experience. Grouping all the work related questions onto a single page so they can be skipped by students. Thoughts?
In general this is a good idea but I think the yearly survey is not the place for it. I do have this faint memory of talking with someone about more regular and shorter surveys for the SC and/or the Foundation. Maybe send the SC an email with your thoughts!
Hey thanks for pointing this out! Unfortunately, I cannot change the color of the light blue text directly. However, when I was helping the NixCon organizers setup their survey, I did find that I can change the background and font color. I just updated the community survey with the same color changes and hopefully it more legible now.
yup fair; see my previous post
Will look into categorizing the questions so they can be grouped on separate pages in the future.
see above
Afaik this is unfortunately out of my hands. Itâs a limesurvey thing.
If you could find the time to give some specific examples, it would be a tremendous help.
Currently, I donât know that I can say there is a specific need for this question. The same could be said for several other questions like the question about where you are from or your age. However, keeping track of seemingly mundane data does provide insight about the direction of the project. Additionally, it could be used in the future to aid certain outreach efforts in the future. For example, let us say we wanted to improve outreach for certain demographics. If we are diligent about the questions we ask and the data we track, we can have some idea whether or not the outreach efforts are working. Hope that helps.
Iâve edit the original post with this information but putting it here as well. The survey will close December 1st, 2025. Please submit your answers before then.
Also, thanks everyone for the feedback. If you have any interest in surveys and data science, and are interested in helping the Marketing Team, please reach out. We would readily welcome the help.
during NixCon and needed a couple days to recharge.
