2021 Survey Results: Difference between revisions

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]].

 

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.

 

 

* The survey required Internet access (but so do contribution to and use of OpenStreetMap, so this particular bias is of relatively little concern).

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.

 

 

* 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.