Earilier this year Mozilla Foundation ran a survey, asking internet (or more specifically Firefox) users “How connected are you”. Now, in November, the results are in and Mozilla has made the raw results publicly available. I expect to have a lot of fun playing with this dataset, but for starters I decided to begin on a light hearted note.

That is I wanted to learn which one is the technologically savviest nation of the European Union. As part of the Mozilla survey users were asked to rank themselves on scale of 1 to 4 from Ultra Nerd (defined as: I build my own computers, run my own servers, code my own apps. I’m basically Mr. Robot.) to Luddite (defined as: Technology scares me! I only use it when I have to.)

To make things simpler I decided to focus on just two degrees of tech saviness - lumping together those who consider themselves Ultra Nerds with those who think themeselves “merely” Technically Savvy, and again those who consider themseves Average Users and Luddites.

The tech savviest nation would then be the EU country, which has the highest proportion of the savvy group out of the total answers.

With a little help of #rstats and the trusty tmap package I was able to visualize the results quite easily.

I am perfectly aware of a possible bias in the selection (Firefox users choosing to reply to a Mozilla survey are hardly a random sample of internet users) but still - my hat is off to our Polish neighbours, supposedly scheming to overrun France with their plumbing :)