Afternoon all,

I'd always prefer to torture English than exclude anyone, but point taken!

Tom (Morris) - as I said when we spoke yesterday - I'll get involved in the Meta discussions as I think they're a really valuable conversation to have across Chapters. I totally agree on matching the questions to ONS data questions were possible to improve direct comparison - having only realised this would have been a better approach after the survey closed when wanting to contextualise results in national averages :(

As for the anonymity of the survey or not - I did answer these questions already on wiki (http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMUK_membership_survey_-_suggestions_and_comments).

As I said there, I'm happy to make lots of improvements, and certainly revisit the question of anonymous/non anonymous surveys. On the one hand, anonymity protects people when answering questions with sensitive personal data such as income or sexuality, and may ensure the results are more genuine. On the other, it can give people licence to give unconstructive or malicious responses which can skew results in small data sets. What we want is the maximum number of responses that genuinely reflect what people feel, without opening the survey up to potential abuse. 

There isn't a perfect solution with Survey Monkey, our survey service. An anonymous survey with a password protected link can still be accessed by non recipients if someone emailed them the link and password - generally not a likely scenario but possibly of concern.

If we use Survey monkey to administer anonymously emailing recipients with unique links that cannot be used if the email is forwarded, we lose the details of the mailing from Civi CRM (although we can create a dummy activity log against people's records), it goes in a plain text email, rather than our own HTML template, which could decrease responses, and we can't follow up any questions that indicate people want to know more about a specific service or opportunity (such as wanting to do more editing).

Conclusion: I shall think'pon this some more, ask around amongst colleagues in my field what they do and why for more insight, and of course, will start on-wiki discussions in good time prior to the next survey so we can all discuss pros and cons and help edit better questions. 

On balance, I'm inclined to think that we should aim for the next survey to be anonymous, if we can get gatekeeping against potential misuse right, and have an option for people to provide an email address if they're happy for their results to be followed up or shared. I'm particularly keen on the latter, as it would allow us to ask their permission to quote individual comments in publications, and allow us to email people with relevant follow up info.

Thanks again for the thoughts!

Katherine


On 10 November 2012 08:39, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly@pobox.com> wrote:
On 09/11/12 19:22, Katie Chan wrote:

With respect, it's simply not a case of merely appearing as politically correct.
Indeed. Somebody should have carried out an Equality Impact Assessment on the survey and the methods used.

I also question the fact that the first survey was tied to a member's identity and a member had to request an anonymous survey. Why not make the survey anonymous (with an identity token given to all members to ensure that only members replied) with an option to sign the survey?

Gordo




_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org



--
Katherine Bavage 
Fundraising Manager 
Wikimedia UK
+44 20 7065 0949

Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).

Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.