Hi folks, thanks for all the feedback. I am seeing a lot of actionable changes/ideas, which is very appreciated.
In response to @BrenBarn’s question regarding the current survey design process: we have a chance to review the questions in advance (PSF Staff, PSF Board, & other community folks we invite) and we can suggest edits or additions. I’ll be frank here, we don’t have data experts paid to work on this survey or PSF Board members directly sponsoring the survey in a hands-on manner (though some of our staff and Board members might be great with data, that is not their $dayjob, and board members can choose where they focus their time). My role is focused on community/communications- so as a non-coder, I rely on Python experts around me to review and make pertinent suggestions. That’s why I’m especially pleased to see all the feedback on the thread this year!
This brings me to the topic of JetBrains running the survey- I’m hearing that folks don’t love the idea of providing free market research for JetBrains, which, makes sense to me. I am sure they are getting something out of it. On the other hand, if they didn’t run the survey for us, it probably wouldn’t be run. Multiple folks at JetBrains are doing this as part of their day job- and I think we can generally agree that we want corporations to contribute to Open Source projects with more than $$. As I mentioned, the PSF doesn’t have anyone dedicated to running this (we are only 12 people, doing a lot!).
I’ve seen a handful of dedicated blog posts on the most recent survey results(1, 2, 3, 4), I’m sure there’s more I haven’t seen, and I coordinated a live stream event with JetBrains to discuss the results (which has 6K+ views). Based on all that, I’d like to think the survey is useful beyond market data for JetBrains. We are thankful for their support & labor (this is the eighth year they’ve administered the survey!).
The questions I will put forth (and some folks are already responding to) is, what would make the survey useful for you? What do you want to know about the current state of Python? I plan to go through all the feedback and make actionable suggestions to the JetBrains survey folks to improve for next year. I can’t promise that everything will be implemented- but I will push for changes to make it as useful as possible for our community 