“What language(s) do you use in fannish or fandom contexts?” “Have you ever used the Fanlore Wiki?” “How did you first hear about the OTW?”
These are questions from the OTW Community Survey, a massive ticky extravaganza designed for one purpose: to find out how we can serve you better. It’s going live today!
We want to hear from you, the members of our communities. We want to hear from users of the OTW’s projects, from OTW supporters and members — and from fans, no matter what your opinion of the organization and its projects. We want you to tell us what you think about those projects and the organization, where you think we’re succeeding or failing. And we also want to learn more about who you are.
The members of Internationalization & Outreach have spent most of the last year gathering ideas for questions from the OTW’s many committees. Our goal was to design the kind of survey we ourselves wouldn’t mind taking: mindful of fans’ need for privacy, conscious of the international nature of fandom, defined in scope, and free from frustrating limits on answer options.
We’re excited to finally open the doors and invite you in. Please bring your friends and help us make the survey a success by spreading the word in your communities!
The OTW Community Survey runs through May 2nd and is hosted on a secure connection at Surveymonkey:
And if you’re as curious as we are about the results: we will be publishing them in aggregate sometime after the survey closes on May 2nd. If you have any concerns or questions in the meanwhile, please contact us!
I’d have liked to take the survey, but “Javascript is required for this site to function”.
I’m sorry about that, but for the scope of this survey, we needed to go with Surveymonkey, even if its functionality partly depends on Javascript. We’re planning to host smaller, future surveys on our own site, here, which will give us more options.
Great that OTW is doing this survey, but for it to have more meaning, a nice obvious post about and link to this survey should be on the homepage of every OTW project (AO3, Fanlore, TWC, Open Doors, etc.) plus all journals/RSS feeds/twitter accounts affiliated with that project.
You’ll still be skewing to people who already know/care about the OTW and (some of) its projects, but a much less supertiny subset of those people. So please make adding those posts & links asap a priority — thanks!
Hi Sk, thank you for your comment and suggestions! The announcement will absolutely go up at other OTW projects too, and in various forms, but because of various factors (the membership drive, the long duration of the survey, and international people on various projects being up at different times) we will stagger it and post reminders instead of doing a single alert.