Survey stuff

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 10:55:51 -0400,
  Robyn Bergeron <rbergero at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>If *not* anonymous - we can add in data points that can be correlated to each answer - basically anything in FAS (region, language, what FAS groups they are part of) could be loaded into their response and then wouldn't be questions folks would even have to answer.  And we could do a lot of additional analysis in that way, if we wanted. Those fields could also be used to determine whether or not to ask folks additional sets of questions, ie: "If folks are in the Docs FAS group, ask them these additional 2 questions."  But, like Eric: I think people respond best and most freely, and in the highest frequency, when they know they can respond without fear of it it coming back to haunt them later.

Anonymity is really hard to do right. Even if you start without an FAS to 
response connection, the answers to the survey itself can identify people 
or at least narrow things down to a small group. Also there will be server 
logs from when the response is done that could reveal information about 
the responder (unless they are very careful).

For myself, I generally don't respond to surveys that claim to be anonymous 
on principal, because I think that claim is misleading. I think it is 
better to make a statement about what the organization plans to do with the 
data and what it promises not to do.