Sorry for necroposting, but I was looking back at this after Conda released the results of a similar survey recently. I was wondering about the details of the survey and thought maybe @smm and/or @nlhkabu could provide some info.
To what extent did outreach go into large, diffuse communities of beginners, learners, or others who do not necessarily travel in “developer” circles (i.e., may not read project mailing lists)? I’m thinking here of things like reddit (r/Python and r/learnpython, maybe even r/programming), IRC, and especially StackOverflow (although I’m not sure exactly how the latter could be reached).
In my experience these are places where there are lots of users with an interesting and valuable perspective that is less pre-shaped by knowledge of Python’s history, tools used in other languages, etc. They are also often low-engagement users who can be difficult to reach through “discussion” type channels (e.g., Python user groups) because they often only participate when they have a question about something going wrong, but for this reason they may know a lot about what kinds of things go wrong and what could be better.
An additional question is whether there was a specific effort to advertise the survey in communities oriented towards alternative tools (e.g., conda, poetry), as these users often may be less engaged with channels oriented towards the standard tools.
Yes, and how about directly on python.org and/or docs.python.org?
That’s great to hear. Was the survey itself available in other languages?
This is a great point and something that struck me as well. In particular it makes me question the slide where among the “takeaways” it lists “PyPI banner is one of the best ways to engage with Packaging users.” I don’t think that is clear at all, at least not without significantly more detail about where and how the survey was advertised.
I think surveys are a promising way to take the pulse of the Python community as a whole, and I’m kind of bummed I missed the lead-up to this one. It was mentioned on another thread that future packaging discussions might include more surveys, so I’m interested to see what can be learned from this one, not just about the results, but about the process of conducting the survey itself.