We propose an anonymous, periodically-administered survey that is made available to all members of Developer DAO, in order to answer the following questions:
What are the IRL identities and attributes of Developer DAO members? (e.g. ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, neuro- and physical-ability, education level, career level, etc.)
What is the overall sense of belonging & psychological safety within Developer DAO?
Is there a delta in reported sense of belonging and safety between different identities?
These answers will give us a benchmark to work from over time to ensure that we have diverse representation, that the overall member experience is positive, and that no identities or backgrounds are made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome in this community.
Why
Diverse representation and a strong sense of belonging for all identities is crucial to creating a Web3 ecosystem that doesn’t propagate existing Web2 (and overall societal) inequities. Since Developer DAO’s mission is rooted in impact and inclusion, it is important that we have a clear benchmark of where we stand on those values, so that we can do any work necessary to improve them.
There is also an opportunity to answer some larger questions in aggregate with this data, establishing Developer DAO as a leader in the DAOversity space. Namely, there are differing opinions on whether IRL identities impact experiences in the metaverse, when so many attributes are hidden behind pseudonyms and PFPs. Establishing the delta in belonging between identity groups and tracking that over time will be a helpful addition to the overall Web3 understanding in this space.
How
Because it’s important for identity-based surveys to be anonymous, we will use a 3rd party tool to ask the survey questions (currently leaning towards AirTable forms). We propose sharing a link to the survey in multiple Discord channels and in Probably Nothing.
All questions will be optional and selection-based (no free-form fields, for ease of analysis).
Identity/attribute questions:
Ethnicity (multi-select)
Gender identity (multi-select)
Transgender (yes/no)
Sexual orientation (single-select)
Invisible / visible disability (multi-select)
Education level (single select)
Career level (single select)
Tech discipline (multi-select)
Geography (Ideally select from a type-down list if supported. Or maybe just country or region?)
Languages spoken (multi-select)
Experience questions:
How did you discover Developer DAO? (multi-select)
Likert rating questions (1-10 scale):
I feel like I belong in Developer DAO
I feel safe sharing my ideas and thoughts to conversations in Developer DAO
I feel like I can get involved in projects that interest me
I feel like the Developer DAO community is diverse
I would recommend Developer DAO to my tech/Web3 friends
I would recommend Developer DAO to my non
We would run this survey every month, and a core team from the DAOversity working group (currently Rebekah and Stefanie - would like to recruit more contributors) will analyze and share results each time.
this sounds great @rebekahb , thanks to you and @Stefanie for putting this together. very interested to see responses from this and then to have a clear reference point we can work from to improve inclusion. overall engagement with such a survey will be an interesting barometer for the community too.
i’m on holiday until the 10th but to contribute properly when i’m back. @jokerdelmar has proposed an analytics guild and am about to open a channel to being organising that, i wonder if there is an interesting collaboration to be had there…
I’d like to enquire about the frequency of the survey’s issuance. What’s the rationale behind the survey going out on a monthly basis? I ask because I’m wondering whether a monthly issuance, might run the risk of lower submission rates? Or perhaps even, rushed or partially completed surveys? I know the responses are optional - but the more data, the better, right?
Is there a way to restrict this to Developer DAO members? (And maybe… in the future perhaps, we should consider a public non-member survey too). The reason why I’m asking is because if you publish this in Probably Nothing, you might get a lot of non-member questions.
Have you already defined all the multi-select options somewhere? It’d be interesting to see what these are. Also some, like career level or tech discipline, might be harder to define for some folks.
Would “Current industry” be an interesting question to ask? It might be really good insight to find out that some people might be in… web3, finance, healthcare, biotechnology, etc. It may be a hard thing to define as a dropdown, but maybe it could be even a multi-select thing (but that list might be huge lol).
4: RE: Geography:
I know you are leaning against free-form fields, but it might not be too terrible in this specific case.
With 3 fields – City / Town, Region / Province / State, Country – it might be easier for people to input (and for you to create) rather than constructing a huge list. City/Town is probably impossible to do with a drop-down, but the data point as free-form is better than no data point at all.
(Also, there might be more widely accepted / globally-used terms than what I’m using here).
But this way, (a) it’s easy and intuitive for people to fill out, (b) you can still sort by country, or even a city + country, and you can try and get some results (but obviously with free-form you would either need to do some data cleanup, or be okay with some inaccuracies).
if we use something like Typeform to implement this, they have nice integrations where i.e. we can automatically pipe responses (maybe with some anonymization) into a discord channel to increase visibility.
Thank you! We should iterate on the frequency based on response rate. @Stefanie proposed monthly to start, and it will be good to observe what works best.
The vote was to start with just belonging questions, and then add identity questions later. Here’s the survey (with the multi-select options defined): Developer DAO - DAOversity Survey
Just tried this out! Great questions, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the responses. Do you think it’d be useful to add one qualitative question at the end, along the lines of one of these?
Ideas:
What is one thing you hope to get out your experience with Developer DAO?
If there was one thing that could improve Developer DAO the most for you, what would that be?
Can I ask why we’ve not included demographic questions?
I suspect (and from observing the community for many months) like the broader technology landscape our membership is also likely to be heavily skewed to specific demographics. This worries me that any responses we get, particularly in the average are going to be skewed in the same way. Would it not be beneficial to be able to anonymously understand more about the person submitting the response so we can better under how groups with different levels of representation feel about the community?
My worry is without this we will find it a) hard to understand the true nature of things and b) harder to track changes over time.
@rebekahb I would love to help out with this initiative if possible! I completely agree with you on how important this and how critical it is to implement things like this early on in Developer DAO
to contribute properly when i’m back.