Hey I want to offer a more constructive comment than my initial response to this, drawing on five years of experience in market research and survey design.
Your current format of asking the community for questions and relaying them more or less verbatim to the witnesses for answers is an extremely poor format for a witness survey. It has resulted in a series of open ended questions (meaning the responses to the survey questions are not a choice between answers or a numeric response). Many of these questions are also confusingly worded.
Allow me to propose an alternative method:
- Ask the community for questions (as you currently do)
- As questions come in, attempt to understand the question and rephrase it in multiple choice (or numeric) format with option for open-ended response, e.g. the question "Where do your earnings go?" from @abh12345 might be rephrased as:
Where do any witness block rewards in excess of monthly witness infrastructure costs go? *SELECT ONE*A: Powered up 100%
B: A mix of powering up and funding Steem community projects
C: Funding Steem community projects 100%
D: Some goes to powering up and/or funding Steem community projects and some is withdrawn from platform monthly (specify what % withdrawn monthly): __% withdrawn
E: 100% withdrawn from platform
F: All witness rewards go to witness infrastructure costs
G: Other (please specify):___________________
- Ask the original question contributor if your reformulated question is faithful to the intent of the original question
- Revise multiple choice question and responses if necessary and repeat until original question contributor is satisfied and the question is rephrased in multiple choice (or numeric) format with option for open ended response.
The benefits of doing this will be massive. You will be able to actually chart the responses, and present this information to the Steem public in easily digestible format as graphs. You will also see your response rate from witnesses skyrocket. The current project, while it may have admirable goals, produced a "survey" that is a total mess.
Finally, many of the questions included in the above "survey" are also extremely leading, to be charitable.
The inclusion of a question such as this:
How does a new user make the availability of his vote known to the cabal of witnesses wannabes trying to overthrow the current witness regime? - @grimgrizhas basically illegitimatized the whole thing in my opinion. This goes beyond a leading question and is seemingly openly hostile to lower witnesses trying to reach higher rankings ("cabal" connotations). It also assumes there is a "regime" of top witnesses. In addition, the question itself seems to be asking about vote selling from the perspective of a community member *trying to sell their vote*. Vote selling is well established as inappropriate. If a community member asks a clearly leading, hostile or otherwise inappropriate question, it is appropriate to ask them to rephrase the question in a neutral fashion.
I hope this helps!
PS - there are a lot of great online resources when it comes to survey design and constructing non-leading questions. If you are having a hard time figuring out how to reformulate a question feel free to ask me and I can point you toward some help.
PPS - not every question that the community asks should be included in a survey such as this. Questions like "how do I become a witness" would be more appropriately responded to by linking the question contributor to any number of great tutorials and Steem blogs on the subject of becoming a witness. Asking every witness to rehash the details of "how to become a witness" is a pointless exercise.
Cheers - Carl
20 years of being backstage for multiple marketing & sales meetings yearly & I agree you are on to something.
I tend to agree, particularly with regards to collecting some quantitative data.
My questions were off the top of my head, and I didn't expect them to be copied verbatim.
This is a useful project for sure, but a few minor tweaks could have a big impact.
@abh12345 I couldn't thank you enough for the questions you presented. I apologize that it wasn't clear how they would be used but I am very confident this is still one of the best ways to proceed. I hope you will join me on V2 to utilize Steem's proof of brain to ensure the questions you feel most useful rise to the top of the list and are the ones used for this project's second survey.
I like this idea but it seems you should be structuring the survey. Some of the questions, like the one you mentioned about how to become a witness, seem pointless to me.
I don't disagree on where the level of some questions fell this time. I do however feel passionately that providing a structure is lending too much influence to an individual or small group of individuals that chooses the structure. Instead I'm seeking to utilize the wider community to determine what questions are actually sent forward to the witnesses by limiting the number of included questions and relying on Steem's unique proof of brain abilities to have the wider community choose what's included. I hope you will join in with a submission for the project and then join us for V2 of @witnesssurvey. Additional curation will help us all select the cream of the crop for what will be forwarded on to witnesses in the next version.
@carlgnash Thank you for your thoughts on the project. I considered options similar to what you said when creating this survey but found that an open survey will work much better over the long run. The main reason is one of the core resources provided by the Steem blockchain in the form of its proof of brain abilities. While this admittedly doesn't completely shine through yet on this first iteration I sincerely believe we'll see continued progress in future surveys. Here's why:
By allowing comments unfiltered it allows the community to ask whatever it, as a whole, feels is most important. If I were to provide an editorial outlook to the questions then I would be continuing what I feel is a huge issue with what we've become used to from traditional surveys. I would be at best indirectly applying my perspectives and desires for the questions and thus making my own voice more prominent than that of the rest of the community. This doesn't mean the questions can't come in the form you presented but it will only happen if the community derives this as valuable.
This is where Steem's ability to derive a proof of brain shines. By applying the limit of seeking only the top 25 questions for response I allow the community to determine if a chosen question is valuable enough to be included. Unfortunately there was limited knowledge of the survey, despite paying to promote the initial post to one of the top posts on trending, so there was a limited community to provide editorial access to the questions. This will change over time and as more people begin to follow the survey's progress. As awareness grows we should see better questions voted to the top of the survey while less valuable questions will fall below the top 25 inclusion line and thus not be directly asked of the witnesses.
I will certainly say that I feel I made a mistake in this first iteration by not limiting the inclusion number to a lower level. I failed to take into consideration that the account's growth would be limited and thus the potential for proof of brain would not fully suffice yet. I mistakenly assumed that my paid promotion would rally enough users to create a level of proof of brain worthy of this cause. That is where I hope you, any many more Steemians, will partner with me to create questions worthy of the cause while curating the best questions to the top of the survey.
There are things decentralization makes sense for and things it doesn't. IMO you would be wise to work with someone knowledgeable about survey design and to brainstorm with some people knowledgeable about witnesses to construct the base survey structure, and ask the community for maybe a couple of open ended questions.
It is admirable that some witnesses are taking the time to answer the questions in their current iteration, but this needs a lot of work. Even if you get better questions from the community, you will never end up with something as useful as a well designed survey gathering quantitative data on these topics. But again, my humble opinion, etc. Sorry I was snarky on my initial response. But honestly, I think you kind of blew it by including some of those questions without exercising editorial control.
Good luck! - Carl
No offense taken at all @carlgnash! I enjoyed reading your thoughts and certainly think they would help provide more quantitative data but don't feel that is the mission of this project. I'm more interested in expanding the ideas of each witness and allowing the community to democratically ask what they feel is the most important questions. There are certainly drawbacks to this method but my belief is that the benefit of openness outweighs the costs.
I do sincerely hope to partner with you in future iterations though! I hope you will review version 2's questions next quarter and help move the most important questions to the top. If you find questions that are not quite to what you'd consider par I hope you will submit a new comment with a better formatted question. This will allow the project to have editorial abilities while still keeping the decentralized mission alive.