Heyall, in preparation for the 2.0 launch, it be great to know more about who our end users are. And to find out, I’m proposing we develop a questionnaire. We’ve done this once before, about six years ago, and *a lot* has changed since, so it’s a good time to do an update (and then maybe do this once a year or so :)
A questionnaire can give us insight into what people think about and want from CouchDB outside of the daily support requests and reported issues. In addition, people can tell us how they use CouchDB and that can help the project make decisions on how to prioritise e.g. new features. I think using Google Forms/Docs for this is the easiest and I’d be happy to set this up, once we have a consensus on the content. The two things I think are important to prepare are: 1. What do we want to know? 2. How do we reach our users? ## What do we want to know This is mostly up to you, here are a few questions that I think might be useful to have answers to, I’m sure you can think of many more: - How have you heard of CouchDB? - How long have you used CouchDB? < 1 year, 1 y, 2y, 3y, 5y, >5y - Which version(s) of CouchDB do you use? 2.0 alpha, 1.x.x,.1.6.1, 1.5.x…1.0.1? - Are you using any other software that replicates? If yes, which one(s)? PouchDB, Couchbase, Couchbase Mobile [iOS, Android], BigCouch, PHP Replicator, Cloudant etc.? - Are you using CouchDB for professional or private projects? - If you can share, what are some of the more impressive metrics of your projects, in terms of: - amount of data stored - number of documents - number of databases - requests / s - number of CouchDB servers - growth - stability - developer happiness - ops happiness - impact - … - If you are using CouchDB professionally, are you interested in being contacted about professional services? [email] - What do you like most about CouchDB? - What do you like least about CouchDB? - What feature would you like to see added to CouchDB? - What feature could you live without? - What could be improved about the CouchDB documentation? - If you are on 1.x, are you: - interested in the cluster-feature of 2.0? - interested in the Mango Query Language of 2.0? - not at all interested in 2.0? - … - … and many many more (but not too many ;) ## How do we reach our users This is just a list that came to mind, I’m sure there is more we can do. - Weekly News / blog - Apache mailing lists - Social Media - IRC - Press? (maybe database weekly?) - Cross-Promotion with family-projects like PouchDB - Can IBM help? - Futon/Fauxton - This is something I’d like to have seen for the longest time: a page in Futon/Fauxton that connects back to the project (that people can opt out of, if they want), but that allows us to post rare project news like new versions available, this questionnaire ^^, security advisories, etc. Since we are planning a 1.7 release, maybe we can add something to Futon there and into Fauxton for the 2.x builds (which would also help with getting feedback from the alpha/beta testers there). This should be too hard, we just need to agree on how we do it :) * * * I can’t wait to get your input on this! Best Jan --
