survey initial draft plan

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Ok..I've been talking to Dana, and I convinced him that he wanted
to do a draft of the entire technical side of the survey for us.

This means ditching sdoc for now. At this point, it's more hassle
than useful, particularly for a finite-length project like this.
(Finally Roger gained clue, yes.)

Here's the list of what he wants:

<dana> A working mysql/DBI/DBD setup on belegost.
<dana> A database my username can use, as well as the username httpd runs under.
<dana> A detailed list of questions, and respondant data types.
<dana> That is, how the data will be stored in the DB.
<dana> A comprehensive list of dependancies
<dana> and in general, how you want dependancy violations handled.
<dana> And you need someone to make it look pretty when I'm done.
<dana> I don't write pretty html anymore.  my web pages are all ugly.

The first two I shall take care of. The list of questions we're
well on our way to having. The response datatype for each question-type
might be something that Pete has been working on in the sdoc.html file:
however, we will have to word that in terms of mysql data types. There
are various mysql docs online. I'll dig one up and post a summary of
data types soon, so people can pick the appropriate ones.

The dependencies are things like when the surveyee forgets to answer
a question, or when he answers two things that are mutually exclusive.
I don't think we have many (any?) of these, but somebody please correct
me. If we do, we should specify how to deal. (Request re-answer,
pick the first one, etc. It will depend on each case.)

And of course, we'll need people to spiffy up the actual webpage
afterwards, but I expect that will be the easy part.

Please throw this list around and decide what needs to be done when
so we can start this happening. I'd like to have the draft done
in a week, so we can start people beta-taking the survey and see if the
questions all suck or not.

It is most important to get a general structure for the survey in
line first. I think this should be done at the level of "which sections
will there be". We will be able to add/remove questions within each
section, but it will be more difficult to add/remove entire sections.

Thanks,
--Roger