I originally posted the below as a suggestion for the policy review thread but I haven't heard anything for a week and a half so i'm just posting here.
Proposal: Anonymized CSV Data Dump for OU Survey Transparency
With the OU tier settling down and no new survey on the horizon I believe now would be a good time to suggest an enhancement to how OU survey results are communicated back to the forums. In addition to what is currently posted, I would like for there to be an anonymised data dump of the responses in a CSV file. I will explain below my thoughts on how I think this is easily achievable (with minimal work) and my rationale for proposing this change.
Implementation
A Survey ID
Every user will have an ID associated with their account that only they may view. From the URL of every user's page, I believe each account already has an associated ID, for instance here's my URL with the "ID" in yellow:
The only thing that would be required here would be to either make that ID in the URL not public or generate a new survey ID which only the user may view (something akin to email which only the user has access to). I believe this would be the only amount of effort required for this change (no larger effort then overhauling the survey process to link responses to survey accounts) but I believe it wouldn't be something time consuming to do and has the upside for the website to possibly do more things with that ID.
Convert Responses to CSV format
Once a private ID is generated for every user, it's simply a case of linking the survey responses to the user id. Because graphs are reported from the survey results, I believe that the current system as is, already aggregates the survey responses into an excel format. The only extra step here is appending the ID to the response and scrubbing any identifiable data; a structure of what the CSV dump might look like is below:
| ID | ROARING_MOON_RATING | DARKRAI_RATING | COMMENTS |
| 52440 | 3 (example) | 3 (example) | |
| 12345 | 5 | 1 | UNBAN PALAFIN |
Granted this takes into assumption that there is a process of converting the survey responses into a CSV structure. If this is currently not in place,
I am more than happy to take responsibility and develop a tool to automate this process myself using dummy data - this would have the added benefit of saving the poster time in aggregating the data manually themselves. Once the data is aggregated, it is very easy to create graphs as is currently done.
Rationale
It's no secret that if you read my forum posts, you would gather that i'm a bit of a sceptic. I like things to be as transparent and accessible as possible and I would like to think that that ethos is shared across these forums regardless of what you might think of me as an individual.
I would like to make it crystal clear that in no way am I accusing Finch, the council or anyone else of manipulating survey results - we may have different viewpoints of how to get things done but I believe we share the same goal in making this game and community better in whatever aspects we can and I think this added layer of transparency would enhance that.
By providing a way to verify that each vote was considered and accurately reflected in the final results, we can ensure the integrity of the process. As a voter, we have to place trust that our vote wasn't discounted because they didn't like what we said or we have to place trust that the poster values honest feedback more than a perceivable negative impression of the metagame of which they control. Heck, it's easy to make a simple honest mistake which would skew the results. This proposal does not suggest any distrust but rather aims to reinforce the existing trust by making the process even more transparent and shutting down naysayers like me.
I see no downsides to this approach, and I believe the effort required to implement it is minimal compared to the benefits it offers.
@ Leftovers / Heavy-Duty Boots
