Sock Teasers and Thank Yous

I promised sock pictures for today, didn't I?

Oops. Well, two pictures now, story behind the socks on another day.


Just that much: they're both Colinette Jitterbug colourways. :)

And now the reason I'm actually posting today even though I should be in bed:

Thank you.

Seriously. I had not expected to already have that many answers to the survey only 24 hours after I opened it. I'm extremely grateful that so many of you are taking the time to answer the questions, have encouraged me and also told me that you think it'll be interesting to see the results. It's very, very much appreciated.

Another reason is that Jorun posted an interesting comment and since I think that some of you might be wondering the same thing, I thought I'd share my answer to her here as well.

I just completed the survey but I must admit it left me feeling a bit confused. Everything seemed to focus on collaborative pattern-making. I'm not a very active member, but pattern-making has never come up in nay of the forums I follow or in discussions with Ravelry friends.

For me, Ravelry is about community, to see what others have done from a certain yarn or pattern, quick access to blogs and the possibility to keep track of ideas. I felt that these concepts were not present in your survey.

I agree with your last part. I'm not that active myself and for me the allure of Ravelry right from the beginning were the various database functions. I've come to like and enjoy the groups as well, but I'm still not terribly active in them.

The whole database thing is underrepresented in the survey simply because it's not the focus of my seminar. The first draft of the survey actually included many more questions about all the functions of Ravelry (because I was interested in that as well), but the seminar is about innovation management in online communities, i.e. the collaboration of people to develop something new online. So I had to focus on that aspect of Ravelry.

I'm sure some of the questions may seem a bit weird, for one thing because of the point mentioned above, but for another because there are several other people doing basically the same survey in other communities and we have to be able to compare the results, so some of the intricacies of Ravelry got lost.

Nevertheless, although the focus is on collaborative designing, everybody's answers and opinions are important to get a representative result, not just those of the people who are very active in the designing of patterns. I'm sure without people (who don't design) using and liking their patterns, many designers wouldn't even design and they and their patterns certainly wouldn't be as well known.