Title: Ethereum_Governance_Survey___Call_to_Action
Category: Magicians

Author: evabeylin
Date: 2019-04-15T17:00:12.580Z

I’ve created an  Ethereum Governance Survey  to gain more accurate data on the community’s perspectives on Ethereum governance (to capture the quiet majority as well as the loud minority).
As the Ethereum ecosystem grows and stakeholders become more emotionally and financially invested, it’s vital that we inform ourselves on the true views of disparate members of the community, to inform future decision making processes. The intentions of the survey are to:

Gain diverse community perspectives (eg. devs, miners, investors, community etc!)
Derive accurate sentiment analysis (better signal to noise)
Provide a channel for anonymous communication

The survey takes inspiration from last year’s EIP0 Shared Values Survey by Status and the ability for data-driven efforts to impact how we collaborate on both technical and political challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem. The results of the Ethereum Governance Survey will be open sourced and published into a report. Note: this is NOT an official survey.
Please take ~10 min to fill it out and share with your peers! The more responses, the more representative the data. Discussion welcome!
https://forms.gle/YMy3uNvBG6QG8yTP8

Author: boris
Date: 2019-04-15T20:24:55.591Z

evabeylin:

The results of the Ethereum Governance Survey will be open sourced and published into a report.


Great! Thank you for committing to this and stating it up front.



 evabeylin:

Note: this is NOT an official survey.


I’m not sure who has the authority to decide whether something is an “official” survey. Can you expand on what you mean by this and why you felt the need to say it?
Can you talk a bit how you came up with the labeling / names and sets of questions? My gut reaction is that the roles are going to result in not helpful answers.
I consider myself a Community Member but not really a fan or hodler. Product Manager / UX Designer are two vastly different roles - why are they included in one category? Same with Business Person / Economist (entrepreneur / marketer). I do business, know little about economics, but am an entrepreneur. Maybe split them out?
On 16, I don’t know what “eth 1.x discussions” is? Do you mean the Prague / Stanford meetings? And I guess Core Devs tomorrow 
Also on 16, Any reason EthMagicians forum isn’t listed as a platform to learn more about Ethereum? And then the followup questions seem to be the same question but pick one platform — but with not all listed?
Having me define the Ethereum vision myself and then ask if I agree with it doesn’t make sense to me.
This is a lot to get through. I answered it all. This might be effective as a much shorter survey with then asking users if they want to do a longer follow up. I hope you get some interesting answers but I think it will be hard to get many answers and the current format has some issues that may prevent useful analysis.
I am trying to give feedback because I would love to see better info. But maybe we can give feedback on these questions before we promote it widely?
Hope this early feedback helps!

Author: chisel
Date: 2019-04-16T05:15:36.485Z

Hey y’all long time no Magicianship. Hope Berlin is treating y’all well, much FOMO for #RunEVM.
While @boris has some strong points here, I want to emphasize as a surveys-nerd who immediately enthusiastically filled it out:
You’ve got something really strong here, @evabeylin. I’m thinking this is the most successful broad-coverage assessment of many stakeholder groups, some of which haven’t been explicitly examined together before. Boris being able to list some stuff you left out is the exception, rather than the rule, in my eyes. This is a great building block to add to the Kyokan-MolochDAO state of ETH2 report, and I look forward to the data outcomes.
Final design note- different folks may have different internalized reference points for Likert scales; I unconsciously assume 1= negative sentiment towards framing question and 5= positive sentiment, so I filled out the first couple Likert scale Qs the opposite of how I intended to answer, before proofreading and catching my error. I’m always available to proofread surveys etc for parallel construction of this type, you can ping me on Twitter or innovative.disruption@gmail.com.
I feel like just as there are peer writing review groups, we need to post up peer methodology/research review groups, to help support one another’s work!
Anyways, it was really fun to take this thorough survey, it was well organized and kicked ass. You might get a higher abandon rate since all the Likert questions are “must answer” in order to submit - if you want a bit wider of a net I think you can still alter that quality when a poll is live. If so you could either count “not answered” alongside 3/neutral on the scale, or make it its own separate class.

Author: evabeylin
Date: 2019-04-16T15:21:56.139Z

boris:

I’m not sure who has the authority to decide whether something is an “official” survey. Can you expand on what you mean by this and why you felt the need to say it?


Of course nobody has the means to “officiate” in this community - this was just a suggestion made to reduce the potential for spam. There are no decisions or impact formally tied to this survey, but hopefully the results will inform our thinking and future decision making processes.



 boris:

I consider myself a Community Member but not really a fan or hodler. Product Manager / UX Designer are two vastly different roles - why are they included in one category? Same with Business Person / Economist (entrepreneur / marketer). I do business, know little about economics, but am an entrepreneur. Maybe split them out?


The roles were meant to create ‘buckets’ to generally understand people’s roles. Hopefully there will be a large enough sample size of disparate groups that we can make cuts like “of those who said they were miners, how do they feel about _______?” Providing too many options splits up the results and I likely would’ve combined a few (like “Product Manager” and “UX Designer”) anyways, expecting that numbers for these roles would be significantly lower than for example “Developer”.



 boris:

Also on 16, Any reason EthMagicians forum isn’t listed as a platform to learn more about Ethereum? And then the followup questions seem to be the same question but pick one platform — but with not all listed?


This was definitely a misstep… although looking at the preliminary results, several people have added it under Other 



 boris:

This is a lot to get through. I answered it all. This might be effective as a much shorter survey with then asking users if they want to do a longer follow up. I hope you get some interesting answers but I think it will be hard to get many answers and the current format has some issues that may prevent useful analysis.


I felt like a shorter survey wouldn’t do justice to all of the topics being covered. I explicitly did not say how many questions were to be answered so the number wouldn’t be a deterrent and those who were committed to submitting valuable data would get through all of it. This is also an anti-spam mechanism, you must answer all questions to submit and that can take time.
Thank you for the feedback, much appreciated!!

Author: evabeylin
Date: 2019-04-16T15:26:02.814Z

Thank you for the feedback and support !!!



 chisel:

Final design note- different folks may have different internalized reference points for Likert scales; I unconsciously assume 1= negative sentiment towards framing question and 5= positive sentiment, so I filled out the first couple Likert scale Qs the opposite of how I intended to answer, before proofreading and catching my error. I’m always available to proofread surveys etc for parallel construction of this type, you can ping me on Twitter or innovative.disruption@gmail.com.


Yes I realized the likert scale inversion when it was too late - didn’t realize the way google forms handled their linear scale creation.  Although it appears that everyone who has reached out with that feedback has also caught their errors before submitting - I’m hoping other respondents follow the wording not the numbers for the scales. Will definitely take you up on proofreading / feedback on the analysis and future surveys!!
The “must answer” for all questions was intentionally as an anti-spam mechanism but will keep the “not answered” in mind for future surveys

Author: AdamDossa
Date: 2019-04-17T01:42:57.949Z

Enjoyed the survey, made me think a bit about myself ;-).
On question 24. there isn’t an option for lack of time which would have been my response. None really applied for me - they all seemed quite negative - maybe a none of the above option would be useful?
Strongly agree the scale should be reversed on the 1 - 5 questions - got the first few the wrong way around even after reading @chisel  comment beforehand!
Question 66 presupposes Sybil resistance (otherwise quadratic voting doesn’t work)I guess?

Author: burrrata
Date: 2019-04-17T06:54:51.678Z

boris:

This is a lot to get through. I answered it all. This might be effective as a much shorter survey with then asking users if they want to do a longer follow up.


Agreed. I was excited to start it, but man there’s a lot there. It would be great to have a short and long form. Questions 21, 22, 23, and 24 would be a great simple, short, and easy quiz for anyone to do in 1min or less. After that, then ask people if they want to donate 5  more minutes of their time filling out more detailed questions.
A few other things:

The first few (20) questions felt a bit too personal. I’m struggling to see why you’d need to segment people into such specific buckets with so many specific questions. Does that really inform a person’s interests in governance?
The part asking me to define the Ethereum vision then asking if I was aligned with it is confusing. I don’t see how that provides meaningful feedback and signalling.
For the EIP section, it would be great if “I don’t feel comfortable answering” was rephrased as “skip” or “I don’t know enough about this topic.”

Hope that helps

Author: evabeylin
Date: 2019-04-18T05:49:01.469Z

Although the questions may seem ‘personal’ they provide categorization to enable data cuts that are more specific, rather than aggregate analysis (eg. how do miners feel about certain topics vs. devs etc.) For the really personal ones related to holdings I left a cop out answer in case users felt uncomfortable.
Agreed defining the vision and then asking about alignment can be confusing however just because you can define the vision doesn’t mean you are aligned  that was the intention - to see how many people believe in it.
Thanks for your feedback!!

Author: rbnz
Date: 2019-04-22T13:34:20.613Z

It was too long for me. And there weren’t enough options to some of the questions.
Also I skipped to the end and saw there was no “anarchy” as a political governance system (which is arguably the status quo).

Author: GridTechs
Date: 2020-04-10T23:05:05.417Z

https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5478500/1f69646b9156
Hi everyone please take a moment to take this survey. It will help out greatly.
Thank you