Evaluate self-hosted survey platform to supersede Google Forms.

[austinlparker]

Surveys! You know 'em, you love 'em, and we'd like to do more of 'em.

Historically, the project has relied on a combination of Google Forms (through various contributors work gsuite accounts) or other ad-hoc survey tools. There are a few challenges with the existing approach --

• Data governance and permissioning. While we do have a gsuite account for the project, we haven't been granting access to the main account (admin@) and there's per-seat charges for new accounts, so we're unlikely to add more. This means that survey data winds up living in places we can't get to over time and has implications for data discoverability.
• Trust/validation issues. There is a certain level of implicit trust required for survey takers to know that a given form is 'official', and usually relies on soft measures of trust such as the presence of the project logo or who the survey comes from.
• Limited capabilities. Google Forms aren't much to look at, there's limited logic and other features, and data analysis is somewhat challenging because you wind up with just a spreadsheet.

I see two main options to supersede Google Forms. The first is to follow Kubernetes, and gain access to the CNCF SurveyMonkey account (https://www.kubernetes.dev/docs/comms/surveys/) and build out stuff there. The second is to use our cloud credits and self-host a FOSS survey tool such as FormBricks (https://formbricks.com/docs/self-hosting/overview).

Advantages of SM -

• SaaS tool, low maintenance
• Existing expertise/potentially reusable stuff from other ecosystem projects

Disadvantages of SM -

• Not sure if we can get access to it
• May be limited in where it can run/options that we have with it
• Limited customization/embedding options?
• Unsure of how we would manage access (shared account? how do we provision/deprovision?)

Advantages of FormBricks/Self-Hosting -

• More customizable
• Easier to integrate with our website (e.g., popover surveys on docs pages)
• Complete control over data/integrations
• Can domain-verify surveys (e.g., 'surveys.opentelemetry.io' as a base URL)

Disadvantages of self-hosting -

• Maintenance of the instance

I have a soft preference for self-hosting given these pros/cons, especially since the Tooling SIG now exists for these sort of shared infrastructure projects. Would welcome other thoughts/suggestions!
Given th

[theletterf]

I think both options would be a massive improvement. I'm more familiar with SurveyMonkey itself. Any chance the account could get promoted to a CNCF wide account that could host surveys from many projects?

[austinlparker]

I think both options would be a massive improvement. I'm more familiar with SurveyMonkey itself. Any chance the account could get promoted to a CNCF wide account that could host surveys from many projects?

I'm not sure -- notably, SurveyMonkey isn't listed as a 'project tool' on the CNCF's project tool web page.

[danielgblanco]

I don't see any negatives to any of these options, and a major improvement on the current solution. This is something that I've been pondering, considering the small feature set of Google Forms. I'd be particularly interested in a tool that does some of the grunt work of analysing the results and providing insights (e.g. the style of "100% of users that answered yes to question 5 also answer no to question 2"). I've found that sort of capability super useful recently.

I've not used either of the proposed solutions, but I'd say some type of analytics would be a major win.

[musingvirtual]

We've been using Google Forms for the end user surveys and it's been a real pain - we usually have to take the data into excel to produce blog posts or compromise on visualizations. I don't see any negatives to either option and either would be fine with me.

An added question about self-hosting over Survey Monkey would be that we would need to handle things like GDPR requests and other privacy issues - I think we can likely manage this by not asking for personally identifying information since most of our surveys don't require it, but we need to have a guideline around that (maybe identifying data only goes in surveys that we delete after 60 days, or something).

[avillela]

I definitely dig the idea of using a more robust tool for conducting surveys. Although I love the idea of a self-hosted tool, they are a bit more of a pain in the butt to set up, whereas with a SaaS offering, you're up and running more quickly (I'm personally a fan of instant gratification 😁). But most importantly, it would be useful to have a tool that can be used to create a decent PDF of the results, since Google forms does a pretty poor job of it. I also agree with @danielgblanco that a tool that could give us some additional insights on the results would be very helpful.

[austinlparker]

One other neat thing about FormBricks, it supports OpenTelemetry! https://github.com/search?q=repo:formbricks/formbricks%20opentelemetry&type=code

[avillela]

One other neat thing about FormBricks, it supports OpenTelemetry! https://github.com/search?q=repo:formbricks/formbricks%20opentelemetry&type=code

Oh, damn. That's actually very awesome!

[austinlparker]

From the Developer Experience SIG, a couple of points --

• It would be useful to have the ability to do continuous feedback mechanisms (long-running surveys) as well as short ones.