NumFOCUS concluded our 2022 Community Survey earlier this month. Annually we take the opportunity to ask our community members for their honest opinions on how NumFOCUS is serving them. Thank you to all who responded!
This year, topics of questions included the use and development of our Sponsored Projects, branding familiarity and understanding, involvement in PyData and other volunteer programs, and financial support for NumFOCUS. In total, 300 individuals completed the survey. We recognize that with a population sample of this size (and a method that relies on voluntary response), the results of our Community Survey may be extrapolated only to a certain extent. Still, we carefully review the responses in order to identify common themes and trends from year to year.
Data from the survey results may be found here. We were especially keen to compare responses to last year’s survey. Read below for an overview of what we found.
Many data points reflected last year’s survey results
For the purposes of comparison, we included several of the same questions that we asked in our 2021 Community Survey. These questions range from topics like brand understanding and volunteer engagement to attitudes about financial support for NumFOCUS from individual and enterprise users of NumFOCUS Sponsored Projects.
The distribution of responses to the following questions, among others, held constant:
How well do you understand the mission or purpose of NumFOCUS?
Are you a member of a local PyData Meetup chapter?
Would you be interested in volunteering with NumFOCUS [this year]?
Additionally, our community members continue to strongly believe that both corporate and individual users of open-source software tools have a responsibility to support the projects financially– and believe that sponsoring or donating to NumFOCUS is a good way to do so. And with only a couple of exceptions, respondents reported the same OSS tools when asked which they use and contribute to most frequently.
(As a note, in response to the interest in volunteering with NumFOCUS reflected in last year’s survey, NumFOCUS created a landing page for community member engagement that may be found here.)
Confidence in NumFOCUS Remains High
Along the same lines, survey respondents were asked a new question related to their general opinion of our organization:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement? In general, I feel that NumFOCUS provides a valuable service to users and developers of open-source scientific software.
In total, 65.6% of respondents indicated they strongly agreed with the statement while another 25.8% agreed.
More insight into community member profiles
This year we also included questions designed to offer us a better understanding of the individuals who comprise our community. In terms of professional category, a plurality of respondents (43%) described themselves as a “practitioner in a role on a corporate team.” Twenty-four percent indicated they were a “researcher in an academic or laboratory environment,” and another 14% said they were a “software/data science entrepreneur.” And regarding day-to-day data-related tasks, a roughly even percentage of respondents reported spending a significant amount of time on “machine learning” and “data wrangling/cleaning” (22.1% and 20.5% respectively). Data engineering (14.8%) and visualization (12.4%) were also prominent.
We also decided to ask whether respondents “identify with a demographic background that historically has been underrepresented in scientific computing or other technology-related fields.” Because NumFOCUS has committed to helping increase the participation of these individuals in the development of open-source technologies, we felt that it was important to understand what proportion of individuals in our community identify this way. This year’s survey revealed that 77% of respondents do not identify with such a demographic background, while 23% do.
Key takeaways
An important insight that this year’s Community Survey offered us is that we need to devise a strategy to increase participation in the survey itself. Total discrete responses were down from 400 to 300 this year, and because our methods of solicitation were similar to last year, it is reasonable to conclude that some of the consistency between last year’s responses and this years is likely explained by many of the same individuals completing both surveys. It is therefore necessary for our team to reach a broader cross-section of users and developers of our Sponsored and Affiliated Projects.
Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the consistency between responses indicates persistent confidence in NumFOCUS as an essential stakeholder in open-source scientific computing. This is perhaps best reflected by the overwhelming percentage of “agree” or “strongly agree” responses to the question about NumFOCUS providing users and developers a valuable service.
Finally, respondents to our Community Survey continue to express their strong belief that the same stakeholders who use open-source scientific software tools should be supporting those tools financially. It will be crucial, then, for our team to continue demonstrating the value of donating to NumFOCUS and our Sponsored Projects and to strive toward even stronger transparency and accountability practices.
We value the trust our community places in us and are constantly looking for ways to improve our service. Do you have anything you’d like to share with us? Please contact us at info@numfocus.org, and if you’d like to support our work with a donation, visit us here to make your gift!
