Thanks for these questions! We’re a small nonprofit research and design team that has been hired by AOS to lead this community research. For this survey, the scope is exactly what we’ve already published:
Participation is optional.
Free-text answers are de-identified before anything is shared.
The anonymized dataset will be openly published for the Nostr community to use and build on.


We were hired by AndOtherStuff to support this work. We’re not collecting data for any external institution, and no one outside the research team has access to identifiable information. Only a four-person research team sees non-anonymized responses. The goal is to help the community understand itself and improve the ecosystem.


If you have specific questions about this research, please reach out to the Nostr community. The anonymized dataset will be released with an open-data permissions statement that makes it freely accessible and reusable by the community, in line with established open-data principles. The whole point of this effort is openness, not agenda-setting.

As for the WEF references: having a board member or past collaborator whose work has intersected with large institutions doesn’t mean those institutions influence this project. What matters is the structure of the work and here, the structure is transparent, community-reviewable, and intentionally built to prevent hidden influence.

Thanks for clarifying, and it’s understandable to question motives in a space that’s still forming its identity. Part of the hope behind this work is to help the ecosystem understand how it can open up and evolve.

As for our role: we were hired by AndOtherStuff to support this precisely because we’re not deeply embedded in Nostr. In participatory research, a bit of distance can actually help. It reduces internal politics, avoids existing power dynamics, and makes it easier for a wide range of participants, especially those who aren’t already close to the core to speak honestly about their experiences. Our job isn’t to steer Nostr but to listen across the community and surface what people need so the builders shaping the protocol can make informed decisions.

If you have ideas about how Nostr can open up beyond the dev community, or things we should be asking differently, that is something you can add to the survey, if you wish to participate. The whole point of this effort is to support the community in shaping its own future.

This is good feedback. At this time, we want the Nostr community survey to focus more on the devs’ experience of building and contributing to Nostr SO THAT it can become a platform for everyone. Having said that, we do think there are some questions in there that anyone using Nostr can answer so please have a look and respond to those. None of the questions are mandatory which means you can skip the ones that you feel aren’t for you.

Yes, AOS will be releasing the results from the survey and make it an accessible resource across Nostr platforms, The raw data will be available to download from GitHub.

Yes, everything will be available in an open and anonymised method.

🙌 We're excited about it too. Yes, as we note in the intro message "An anonymized version of the survey results will be made openly available to the community. Free-response answers will be reviewed and de-identified before publication."
We will also make the anon data available for others to download, verify results and build on.