[LispSea] the Lisp Questionnaire

[Brandon J. Van Every]

The Lisp Questionnaire 
http://www.xs4all.nl/~alemmens/alu/questionnaire.txt is ineffective.  If 
you look at the database of people who answered the Questionnaire 
http://www.xs4all.nl/~alemmens/alu/database/ you will see 235 replies.  
The first submission was made in June 2004.  226 of the submissions 
occurred in 2004.  Only 8 in 2005.  Only 1 in 2006, in January.

And this is worldwide.  That's PATHETIC.

Since this resource is all but useless, and all but ignored, we should 
ask why.  If we think surveys are important, we should do a proper one.  
And figure out what makes for a "proper" one, so that we don't end up 
with something equally pathetic.

Some obvious things about what's wrong:

- I'm not about to dig through a worldwide list of 235 people, one by 
one, to find out anything about them.  It's an invitation to a big 
chore, with no promise that it's going to get me anything of value.  Why 
would I look at such a list, compared to posting on comp.lang.lisp or 
some other forum where people will actually respond to my question?  
Even if crickets chirp, they chirp more quickly than digging through a 
list of random stuff.

- If people were grouped by geographic location, I'd have a much 
stronger incentive to look at their stats.

- If people were grouped by interests....

- If people were grouped by Lisp implementations....

- If groupings in general were searchable, like a proper database...

- If the Questionnaire and Database were displayed on a website that had 
a certain level of professionalism, so that it appeared to be well 
maintained, well cared for, actively supported....

- If the database were simply much larger, so that it appeared to have 
value...

- I'll wager no active effort is being made to get people to answer the 
survey.  Either that or sporadic efforts were made, and the survey taker 
was too swamped to do anything with the results he got.  So there is an 
infrastructure and automation issue here.

Now, there may be a meta problem about whether anyone cares about these 
sorts of things.  The last time I think I ever looked at a database of 
people's stats was probably on Gamasutra.  That would have been 3 years 
ago, when I was sticking myself in there as a contractor and was curious 
what others were doing.  I've never cared since.  So my question is:

- is there a site out there, for any language or technology, that 
demonstrates "best practices" for taking surveys and using the results 
to further some promotional goal?

'Cuz we should study that up.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every