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2021 Survey Results: Difference between revisions
→Plan for presentation of survey results
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Two opportunities were provided to offer comments, at the end of the feedback section of the survey, and between the community sentiment and demographic sections of the survey. Respondents were given the option of allowing anonymous public release of comments or asking that they be read only by members of the OSMF Board of Directors. All comments in languages other than English were machine translated into English prior to publication. The spreadsheet containing comments eligible for public release is [[:File:2021 survey releasable comments ENG.ods|here]].
== '''Target Audience''' ==
The target audience was the OSM community, and was specifically not limited only to members of the OSM Foundation. The OSM community is ill defined and definition of it has been controversial. For purposes of this survey, the community was defined as consisting of mappers, communicators, data users, developers/maintainers, event organizers, and hardware/system operators involved in the OSM project. A freeform "other" answer was also made available in that demographic question.
=== '''Selection biases apparent in the survey''' ===
* ·The survey required Internet access (but so do contribution to and use of OpenStreetMap, so this particular bias is of relatively little concern).
* ·It required knowledge of one of the 18 languages used in the survey (this is the largest number of languages used to date in any OSMF survey, and was part of a concerted effort to reduce bias toward speakers and readers of English).
* ·It was announced and advertised through OSM-centric communications media (OSM mail lists; direct email to user groups and working groups; social media channels used by OSM contributors and users, local chapters, and local communities; newsletters; banners on osm.org and in editors) but access to the survey instrument was unrestricted (this created potential for oversampling, i.e., inclusion of respondents external to the OSM community).
A member of the community independently published the questions separately from the survey. This injected an additional selection bias by alerting some potential respondents to the specific questions to be asked, causing some of them to decline to participate. The Board had deliberately declined to publish the questions in advance so as to avoid this problem.
Post-survey, we noted that members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation were overrepresented. Based on the demographic data, slightly more than 1/5 of respondents declared themselves to be Foundation members. However, comparison of summary statistics of the entire sample with summary statistics of Foundation members revealed no substantial bias in the data due to this. It is highly probable that employees of NGOs and firms using OSM data as well as members of working groups as well as of local chapters and communities were also overrepresented. Again, however, no substantial bias in the data due to this could be discerned when results from those segments were compared to other segments.
=== '''Assumptions:''' ===
* That the sample would be biased toward individuals with above-average engagement in the project, and that casual mappers and data users would be underrepresented. This assumption implies that mappers eligible for the "active contributor program", who number fewer than 8,000, would constitute a significant portion of the sample and likely be overrepresented.
* That Foundation members would be overrepresented, since Foundation members are typically more engaged (as noted above, this assumption was justified).
* Some degree of geographic normalization of data would be possible by comparing responses to known characteristics of mappers in the community, such as locations and volumes of edits and changesets from OSMstats (and this normalization effort has indicated that the results are not significantly biased in any direction in terms of geographic coverage).
* That making demographic data optional would increase overall participation in the survey (the results justified this assumption).
* That forcing answers to the "feedback" and "community sentiment" questions would reduce bias against respondents who either didn't care or have an opinion about the specific issue (the high number of "neutral" responses to question F1 is a strong indicator that this assumption was justified).
* That the sample would be biased toward individuals interested in the OSM project.
== Anonymization of survey data to preserve privacy ==
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