Umbraco Community Health Survey
Your responses, your feedback...your chance to see for yourself!
Introducing the first-ever Community Health Survey!
Over the past few months, we asked you - the Community - to let us know what you think about Umbraco.
How you feel about Umbraco, how you work with Umbraco, how you interact with Umbraco, and more importantly - what you want from Umbraco.
An incredible 122 (one-hundred-and-twenty-two!) of you took the time to answer 30 questions on everything from contributing to Codegarden, to Cloud! Now, the time has come to share these incredible results with you.
If you'd prefer, you can jump straight to our takeaways, or even download the survey report right away. But first, here is some background on why we did what we did:
Thoughts from Emma
I lose count of how often I tell people we are a friendly community. I tell people when I’m onboarding them; I tell developers who use Umbraco but have never been to a meetup; I even tell my pals who work in other distant industries and have no idea what or why the word community should come up in relation to a product like a CMS. We wear it emblazoned on the back of our hoodies, it’s in our marketing material, and it’s in our Code of Conduct.
As a tagline, it’s a fitting one for a product that prides itself on its ability to allow developers the ability to build the way they want to build. It’s fitting for a community of people who have shaped the product with their code contributions, their knowledge sharing, and their evangelism. It’s fitting for a community that takes time to welcome new people, from all different backgrounds, into the fold to ensure that everyone gets a say on how we innovate, not just the loudest or most persistent of voices.
How then, as we grow, do we stay friendly?
I’d love to tell you now in just a few bullet points what the answer to that question is, but despite my having my own very definite ideas, the key to answering this question now is to ask you. For all my experience, and that of my colleagues and of my friends, the longer I’m in this role, the less well-equipped I am to answer this question.
Back in the old days, when I started here (Feb 2021), we had planned to ask some questions of the community. As a DevRel team we know that staying close to the community is key, and we’d love to kid ourselves and say that we’re oh so approachable, and that naturally we'd hear your thoughts because of course you’d come and chat to us. Of course, you’d tell us your thoughts. Of course, you wouldn’t be afraid to disagree or offer some constructive criticism. However, it became apparent early on that we needed to give you the opportunity to tell us your thoughts without needing to be physically present with us or being put on the spot for your opinion over a hot or cold beverage.
And so the survey was born. And we were delighted with the number of respondents and even more delighted by the results. It is fair to say that we didn’t expect too many responses, given the length of time it took a person to fill in the survey, but the 120+ proved us happily wrong there. The first win was that the fact that so many people were willing to spend so much of their time sharing those thoughts with us, which was a good indicator that we had a somewhat healthy community. If I really don’t like a product, I vote with my feet and I take myself somewhere else. A huge thank you goes out to each and every one of you who responded.
Our findings speak for themselves. I’d like to pick out a few key points to share with you and have done so below but by and large, I’d love for you to see the data yourselves. We have worked hard to collate and interpret the findings in a thorough but readable way. This will by no means be the last you hear about the findings, but we wanted to share the info we have with you so you can see for yourselves what it’s like around these parts - how is the Umbraco community doing right now?
What we asked about
All in all, the survey posed 30 questions to gain an insight into both sentiment around Umbraco as a company and as a software, and to learn how you as a Community interact with them. These questions covered a mix of the different areas that you might have come into contact with:
- Relationship with Umbraco
- Community
- The Umbraco CMS
- Contributing to Umbraco
- Users and clients
- Products and hosting
- Codegarden
- Sentiment
So - what did we learn?
As we mention in the report, we cannot- and should not - dictate how this data should be read and evaluated. There are so many different categories and complexities that the responses show, that they key takeaways will be different for everyone based on their own roles and experiences.
However, we’d like to include some of the key takeaways for us in the Developer Relations team:
A huge portion of our Community describe themselves as Developers (give or take a few qualifiers)
We are made up of many things, but when we’re addressing you, we are generally addressing technicians. We might have different backgrounds, but we have similar interests and we can and do enjoy technical talk.
Our documentations is the first port of call for learning about Umbraco
This is a joy to learn. One of the biggest deciding factors for people when choosing a technology, is the availability of good documentation. The fact that you, as a community, head straight there, is a testament to all the hard work the docs team and curators have put into getting the docs into great shape.
We always describe Umbraco as a really flexible tool and looking at the sites you are building, you think so too
What a range of implementations. Small scale sites all the way up to massive projects are being built by Umbracians in the Community.
You contribute in so many different ways
We knew you were busy in the forum and we knew that you were busy on the repos but the community are active in places we haven’t always considered, such as Stack Overflow.
The greatest gift we could give you is more time
So many contributors, or would-be contributors, wish they had more time to contribute. We can see now that by working with your employers and showing them the benefits of their teams being part of an OSS community, we could welcome so many more of you.
Where we go from here...
The specific areas of feedback have and will continue to be passed on to the relevant areas of the company and the people who can make things happen.
As for the Developer Relations team itself, there is now a wealth of insight that can be used to frame and inform what the focus areas are and problems to be solved for the next year and beyond.
While we would love to promise that action will be taken on all of the points raised in the survey, we’re sure you understand that we’re not magicians. What we do promise is that your feedback has been heard by us in the Developer Relations team, and will be heard by the right people at Umbraco HQ.
But it doesn’t stop there, either.
One really helpful takeaway from the survey that we can act on right away, is that so many of you felt that the opportunity for you to give us feedback shouldn’t be limited to once a year in the format of this survey. It’s with that in mind that we have decided to relaunch the Office Hours in 2023 so that we are keeping two-way comms going throughout the year. We all work better when we know what the other is up to, how they’re doing, and what they need. We can’t do magic; we can’t make all your wishes come true - but we can listen. And we can respond accordingly. What we would like to do is to make that process easier for you to reach us, going forward.
So please, enjoy reading through the results - and please, share your thoughts. With each other, with us.