we currently evaluate new communication channels to improve discussions within the RIOT community. We consider introducing a forum, implemented in Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/).
As your opinion matters, we kindly ask you to participate in the following brief survey, which we hope will help us to decide on the next steps:
The survey consists of max. 10 questions and should not take more than five minutes.
Are you planning to publish the results?
Good question. Currently, @waehlisch has access to the raw data. @waehlisch, do you think we could publish them in one shape or form?
It took me a bit to compile them, but here are the results:
All in all, the results speak all for our ongoing migration work.
The usage of chat platforms already reflects our provided chat options: Most seem to prefer IRC and Matrix and the least number of people seem to dislike them.
Regarding social media outreach, we might want to think about doing more on Youtube (67,65% of the people who answered use it regularly), Reddit, and LinkedIn (the latter two have similar usage as Twitter where we already are quite active). Hopefully the #riot-os tag on Stack Overflow will increase our activity there to fit the usage by our community. For the platforms named it might also make sense to provide OAuth login for this forum.
yes, this was the reason why i started to collect more videos and extend the playllists: https://www.youtube.com/c/RIOT-IoT/playlists
i thought we had a discussion to enable all platforms that are supported via OAuth. i don’t remember any reason against that.
I actually also thought about more community stuff, like making short videos (but who has the time for that…) or using the community tab for announcements. There are also stories, if we want to be goofy 
Yes, I was stuck a bit in the pure analysis of the Survey, but keeping things as open as possible, makes more sense.
I am a bit curious about the preferences of the 11% who are not on the mailinglists and the 22% who didn’t participate in any discussion there. (I hope the 11% are not included in the 22%)
Not quite sure how you mean that. Do you want the “When considering discussions related to RIOT, which communication channel do you prefer?” data for those 11% who are not on the mailinglists and those 22% who didn’t participate in any discussion there? On “I hope the 11% are not included in the 22%”: Why shouldn’t those two sets overlap btw? You can after all not participate in any discussion while not being subscribed to a mailing list pretty easily .
Thats what I meant, just making sure, thx 
Yes, I would like to see that. I mean these are the people that might be more involved on other channels than the mailinglists, aren’t they?
Also interesting is if a forum increases their interaction with the RIOT community? and their prefered chat-based communication.
But only if the data is any meaningful, I don’t know how many people answered the survey.
90 people answered the first three questions, the remaining questions (so including the questions you were asking about) were answered by 68 participants. The current usage (users on the forum, subscribers on the mailing lists) are:
So I think we can say that the survey is meaningful.
First the 11% (7 participants) who are not subscribed to any mailing list:
For the 22% who never participated in a discussion on the mailing list:
For the potential of of interaction with the RIOT community I also found the inverse sub-set interesting
Those 22% amount to 20 participants btw, so a bit more representative than the participants not subscribed to any mailinglist.
I moved this topic to the community category now, as the original call for the survey might have been an announcement, but now that the results are also posted and discussed here, it fits more into the community related stuff.
