A word of caution about filling out this survey...
The FreeBSD Foundation (FF) put out a survey once before in 2016 (I think). I diligently filled it out taking some time to put in as much detail as possible. Start to finish probably took about 30-40 minutes. And then never heard any more about it.
A few quick bits here:
1. All of core.10 wanted to conduct a community survey. None of us liked being in the position of handwaving and espousing random opinions without any actual data to justify a random claim.
2. There are lots of vocal minorities in the FreeBSD Project. Some of the loudest defenders of a particular thing, be it an idea, element of our community ethos, specific technology, etc., are also on the minority. If that is the case, or believed to be the case, the first thing you need to do is gather actual data and then analyze the data.
3. I have access to the 2016 survey and it was used to help craft the 2019 survey. The 2106 survey was made available to the previous core team. The FF did make use of this data for marketing purposes, for directing efforts within the FF (e.g. software development work, on-boarding material like howto guides, marketing and conference spend, CI grants, etc) but none (or very little) of that information transitioned over to the FreeBSD Project, or was acted upon by the project. The current Core Team is, imnsho, very involved in running with the data we have collected and making adjustments where necessary.
4. Some of the questions asked in 2016 are also part of the 2019 survey. Shockingly (or not, depending on your perspective), some of the data from the 2016 was already very suggestive in that various issues were already at a 50% dipping point over 3 years ago (3 years!!!!). Some of these trends have only accelerated as time has passed in the intervening time (3 years is an eternity in terms of Internet years).
5. Credit where credit's due: the entire core team has been involved in the survey. I'm taking a rotation through the spotlight and being public with regards to the survey, but everyone on the core weekly calls has been involved in the survey.
6. It's a lot of work to do one of these surveys, never mind the effort associated with picking this volume of data apart, making it digestible, and presenting it. At BSDCan the Core Team will be discussing the results of this survey in the Developer Summit. It will probably take a bit longer for a final report to be made available for the wider FreeBSD community, but we're 100% planning on doing that.
Cheers. -sc
