Bruno Kerouanton

Here is a quick update to the 277 persons that participated to my experiment with Naymz : I’m still working on the results and the report, as I didn’t expect this to take so long time, and as I also had unexpected extra work to do at home since 2 weeks that severely impacted my performance ! Below are some facts so you can follow this :

• I have sent nearly 300 emails, including 4 different versions of a questionnaire, in two languages.
• I received more than 100 answers, that I am stil reading one by one to manually extract the answers on my huge Excel (OpenOffice, in fact) sheet.
• The spreadsheet is 48 columns and 280 rows, that’s about 13500 cells ! I need those 48 columns to monitor each answer, the answer date, the type of survey sent, the results, and so on… And I’m doing all that cell by cell since I didn’t find any better way.
• I had initially planned that I could automatically extract those answers by writing a script, but after receiving the first answers I quicky noticed it would be troublesome : Although I expected people to answer “Y” or “N” for each question, as I had prepared a “[Y / N]“ string at the end of the line of each qustion, most people answered with “Yes”, “Yes, but…”, or other things that would have been impossible to parse automatically. But at the same time this is great since most people felt happy to get back in touch with me and tell other things that I was also glad to read !
• I fell very sorry and a bit guilty for all those people who not only answered to my survey, but also discussed with me, sent me news about themselves (new babies, new jobs, a lot of great news indeed !!! I’m guilty since I’ve read your emails, but as I didn’t want to interact with the long extraction of all data, I just told myself that I just couldn’t answer now otherwise I would not be able to finish in time… I’ll write you back soon, individually. I promise !
• I feel also sorry for the people who received all those automatic Naymz invitations, this is something I couldn’t prevent since Naymz keeps sending an invitation per week during one month until people accept or decline… That is somehow indecent, but that’s the way they do their business. I disagree with such methods and I apologize to the people who complained back to me.

Here are the items left to do, you’ll see that I’ll have some work before it’s ready :

1. finishing entering all data into the spreadsheet (nearly done),
2. doing stats and extraction of aggregated values,
3. making some graphics,
4. including those, as well as the results in the report,
5. giving my interpretation,
6. finishing the report, although it’s already 9 pages long,
7. translating the report, since I’m writing it in french for now and I know that some people would like to have it in english,
8. Send emails to the people who participated, and distribute the report,
9. have some rest (or not…)

I’ll keep you informed, and even if you don’t come frequently on my blog, I’ll send you an email when the report is ready !

By the way, let’s be clear : the ONLY social network profile that I maintain is on LinkedIn ! I’ve got some others, but they are often obsolete and unmaintained as I don’t have the time for that and that I don’t feel the need of having several profiles… Quite interesting to see that most of you feel the same, as I found out of your answers