We Need Your Help – Volunteering with the Survey Team

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Update: This search for volunteers is no longer ongoing.  You may still contact us to volunteer, but we may be a bit slow to respond as we currently aren’t dedicating resources to it.

Hello all! The Survey Team is currently looking for new volunteers, particularly people with programming or writing skills as we try to work on our backlog of data and get out more analysis to the public.

As you probably know if you are reading this blog, the survey team is the team that does the Ace Community Census each year. The Census is one of the major sources of quantitative data about asexuals, which also means it is a lot of work. We actually collect more data than our current volunteers have time to process, which is why we are looking for additional volunteers to join the team:

The major roles that we currently need volunteers for are:

  • Analyzing survey data (primarily using Python and/or R)
    • We currently use Python 3 for most of our analysis, which is where we are currently most in need of assistance. We also use some R for our data preparation, so knowledge of R is also welcome.
  • Writing up survey results, either as primary summary reports or one-off blog posts
    • No special software skills required, just a general familiarity with statistical analysis and semi-formal academic writing (think class report more than published thesis).
  • Responding to data requests from researchers (by evaluating requests, sending the appropriate data, and forwarding any questions to the appropriate team members)
    • No software or statistics skills required. Mostly requires good communication skills and the ability to check for and respond to email updates ~once a week.
  • Translation of the survey into additional languages:
    • We do not have the capacity to analyze additional surveys. Having an archive of data for another language may still be beneficial, or if someone with those language skills could help analyze data it would be most welcome.

If you are familiar with Python and some statistics, we strongly encourage you to help us analyze the survey. Without this we cannot complete our reports on the previous surveys. Knowledge in R is also welcome, since it has been used for data preparation.

For the reports, we just need people with good English academic writing skills – no special knowledge required, although a basic understanding of statistical analysis is recommended so that you can understand the things you are writing up.

In general, the roles in the survey team are flexible, with team members often assisting with several aspects of the survey and changing roles as needed.

Primary analysis of each year’s survey begins in late November after the survey has closed, but due to the current backlog of data we have from past years, analysis is currently conducted year-round.

Time commitments are flexible depending on your availability at any given part of the year, but we recommend setting aside at least 4-5 hours a month to do work on your own time, plus monthly team meetings. (Note that team meetings may be more frequent in the couple of months leading up to the survey release in late october).

If you are interested in helping the survey team, please contact the Survey Team directly at asexualcensus@gmail.com. While new team members are considered on a rolling basis, we are ideally looking for volunteers who can start by September 10th. Please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

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