"Whether you are a long-term Drupal developer or a recently joined new person to the Drupal community, I'd like to invite you to take part in the State of Drupal 2007 survey that I created. The goal of the survey is to better understand our needs, and to help prioritize our efforts. If you can't attend DrupalCon Barcelona, don't worry; I'll make sure to share the results after the conference."

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"Ellen and Prabath from the OpenUsability.org project are conducting a User survey on how our users are working with Serendipity. The results of this survey will have a huge impact on Prabhath's student work as a Usability Engineer - he will try to make suggestions to enhance the user experience of the Serendipity Entry-editing interface, and maybe more.

Please participate, everyone. You will benefit by making Serendipity more user-friendly to fulfill your very own needs!"

Original Post , Forum Post, Serendipity Survey

Here is your chance to help out the academic scholars figure out what open source is all about. Lara Thynne, a PhD candidate at Deakin University Australia, is running a survey to be used in examining the motivation of open source users when it comes to participating in open source projects and using open source software. Ms. Thynne's difficulty is that she is needing around 1500 completed surveys and hasn't quite connected with the open source communities to "get the job done".

I encourage anyone in the open source community to take some time and fill out the survey. Personally, I found the survey interesting by what questions she chose to ask in her survey and maybe more interesting which questions she may have left out of the survey. She claims the survey takes only 5 to 10 minutes, but to be honest it took me a full 15 minutes (maybe I'm just slow). I am not sure how much traffic the server can can handle, so if you can't make a connection right away you might want try again at a later time. The link to the survey is: https://dcarf.deakin.edu.au/surveys/oss/ .

I don't care who you are. I don't care how much education or how little education you have. If your profession is in information technology (IT), you and I share the same exact thoughts, questions, and even dread toward this particular topic. The topic is user surveys.

What am I talking about, you ask? Ok, picture yourself arriving to work and finding "it" in your inbox at the entrance of your cubicle. Let's go even further, you're the one that placed the survey in everyone's inbox and now the time has arrived to collect the paperwork, tally the results, and draw conclusions for the project that you are working on. At this moment, reflect on your thoughts and frame of mind while you hold those surveys in your hands. We all have that same creepy voice in our heads asking us the question, "Do these user surveys hold any real value?" The voice demands an answer.

Whether you answer that question with a "yes", "no", or "maybe" will depend on your own experiences with surveys. However, if I cared to guess I would say that most of us would answer the question with a "maybe" knowing full well we believe the answer is a "no". Yet if you're responsible in providing support to IT users you really wish the effort put into surveys would bear fruit and help identify the improvements needed for the products or services you provide.