Thinking about the 2020 SIGCAS membership survey

Last November (2020) the SIGCAS executive board conducted a survey of SIGCAS members to get a picture of who we are, where we come from, what we're interested in, and what the membership would like to see the board do to better fulfill its mission. Based on discussions with the executive board, SIGCAS Vice Chair Lisa Kaczmarczyk implemented the survey using Survey Monkey. As with all surveys one can't get all the information one would like and the more information one tries to obtain, the fewer people are likely to supply it. We settled on eight questions and we received input from 68 people, about 23% of our membership (then just under 300 people---now slightly over).

What follows is a presentation of the survey results along with some commentary. How I interpret the data and what I think ought to (or could) be done with the data might not be how you'd interpret the data and think about what ought to be done. And that's a good discussion to have! At any rate, the responses that we've received represent a valuable part of our collective intelligence, consciousness, and visions for the future. The hope is that these will inform out work going forward.

Please note that I'm not doing any professional analysis since I'm not qualified to do that. I also suspect that the wisdom we can glean wouldn't be found via additional number crunching. And I would also add that there are dangers to reading too much into survey data. As a precaution I have asked the other board members to take a look at this article so I don't get anything terribly wrong.

Just a reminder that the data we have doesn't necessarily reflect the totality of what our entire membership would provide. (Although, as one somewhat validating figure, the percentage of people outside of North America on our roster is about the same as the percentage of people who told us they were from outside North America on the survey, 72%.) Also, I'm trying to avoid the temptation to comment on everything. There's too much material for that. And, obviously, there are too many suggestions and ideas out there for SIGCAS to move on all of them. But based on these responses a multitude of useful information is now available and it should help lead us into productive discussions and actions.