2020 Australian Go Census

So, the website is in a much better shape than it was – many thanks to Genius Girlfriend 2D! But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

No, today I’m writing to tell you about the 2020 Australian Go Census. This is an annual survey I run, trying to get a picture of who is playing go in Australia over the last 12 months, where they’re playing, what gets in the way of playing, what they’d like to see done, etc. This is entirely voluntary and anonymous, of course – the most identifying questions asked are gender, age and state of residence, and all of those questions are optional.

In addition to being anonymous, the data is made available to everyone who would like a copy. I tend to post links to such things all over the place, but if you want a copy you can submit an e-mail address here. Obviously, any address given will be used once, for that one purpose, and then the list destroyed – and again, is entirely anonymous and will not be shared with anyone. This is completely unrelated to PacifiGo the commercial entity – this whole thing is something I do because I enjoy data and because I genuinely think it’s useful information to have.

The survey is pretty short – in theory there’s 27 questions, but you absolutely won’t even see all of them, the vast majority are multiple-choice questions (and most can be skipped) so they’re pretty short. However, it really would be helpful if you could take the 2 to 5 minutes to fill it out – one of the key goals of this is to try to figure out if there’s some kind of predictable relationship between the various go server ranks, and if offline ranks can be “pegged” to that in some kind of sensible fashion. This would be immensely useful if you come across someone who plays, say, at 5k on KGS, and you are 8k on OGS – how do you figure out what kind of handicap would be sensible? Yes, over multiple games you can usually work it out, but it takes a while and this isn’t always feasible.