Find the open source survey, Save the doctor
Submitted by Bryan on February 21, 2007 - 4:05am
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 will make sure her invitation to complete the survey is placed on Planet Drupal via this post. If you have ties with other open source communities it would be great if someone could post the same information from her e-mail that I've included below onto the project's forums or equivalent "Planet". Also, she's looking at all open source communities so it doesn't have to be related to content management systems or even a Web application.
Below is the original e-mail that Lara Thynne sent to me.
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 will make sure her invitation to complete the survey is placed on Planet Drupal via this post. If you have ties with other open source communities it would be great if someone could post the same information from her e-mail that I've included below onto the project's forums or equivalent "Planet". Also, she's looking at all open source communities so it doesn't have to be related to content management systems or even a Web application.
Below is the original e-mail that Lara Thynne sent to me.
I have been directed to your website by a fellow Open Source programmer who thought you might be able to help me. I am currently completing my PhD at Deakin University Australia and am running a survey using the www.phpsurveyor.org to examine Open Source user’s motivations to participate in the community and to use Open Source Software.Revised at 6 AM CST: I noticed shortly after my post that I couldn't connect to the survey. 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 survey has been designed through many months of research based on the relevant literature and is quite different to many that are floating around. The survey takes around 5-10 minutes to complete and is completely confidential, with participants able to log out at anytime.
To gain a statistically significant sample which is representative of the community, I really need to have around 1500 completed surveys - which is proving to be a greater challenge than expected. At the completion of my research I am more than happy to provide anyone who is interested with a copy of the results.
The survey can be found at https://dcarf.deakin.edu.au/surveys/oss/ and I was hoping you may be able provide a link on your site or assist me with distributing this information?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely
Lara Thynne
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Survey back up.
Couldn't reach the survey all morning, but I see that this afternoon it is up and running!
Not relevant to most contributors
I've been a free software user for a decade, my principle business for the last three years has been free software deployment and development (the last year being almost entirely centered around Drupal), and I found the majority of the questions in this survey to be totally irrelevant to me, in the sense that they were just coming from the wrong direction.
The survey appears to assume a particular type of developer, which I would think corresponds to at most the top dozen or so out of the hundreds of contributors to Drupal. I have done a few custom modules in the past, but now most of what I need can be done with CCK and Views, so I'm spending most of my time doing highly convoluted theming. All of my work goes to the customer under the terms of the GPL, so I would be considered an "open source developer", but most of this is work specific to that customer, only a fraction of a percent of which is generally useful features or improvements to existing code, scarcely any of which is of sufficient quality to contribute back upstream. The majority of software development (free or proprietary) is custom software. I expect most contributors to Drupal are in a similar position, only in their case the fractions are larger :)
I can say that my business is entirely dependant on free software, and all of my output is free software. But I couldn't really say what proportion of my time is spent working on "open source projects". If the "project" is the web applications I develop for my customers using Drupal as the underlying platform, I can say 100%, but if the "project" is Drupal itself, it's almost zero (unless you're going to be very charitable and say that by merely deploying and "selling" Drupal, I'm contributing to the project).
And how much time do I spend working on "unpaid" development? I'm half of a small web development shop mostly catering to other businesses of about the same size; I'm lucky if any of it is paid! If I report a bug, or submit a patch or a workaround for a problem, or copy and paste a neat snippet of code to drupal.org, is that unpaid development, or merely part of the normal development process for what I'm being paid to work on? Either way, it's hard to quantify.
For a project like Drupal only a handful of stars (Dries, Steven, Earl Miles, Johnathon Chaffer, etc) out of the 500 contributors to 5.0 would be able to answer the questions in this survey. I think you'll be hard pressed to find enough people working at this level to come up with 1500 respondents, and if you do, you'll only be examining the tip of the iceberg of free software development.
...
Maybe. The survey does have some assumptions but all surveys need to start somewhere. I don't code nor do I make money off Drupal but I do participate in the Drupal community. If you deploy sites, provide qa feedback, contribute support and/or documentation then you are effectively participating in Open Source development even if you don't code.
Benefit of the doubt
I do agree with you Davidson that some of the questions seem to mix the terms of developers, users, community, and project to where you're not sure who is being asked what. But I think it is important to give the questioner the benefit of the doubt. because it appears to me that the survey is written by someone looking into the open source community from the outside. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing especially when you hope the questioner is objective.
The Open Source Community is enourmous, needs to be treated so
Matthew: Its interesting that you mention that not being a leader of a project like Drupal made you feel like the survey didn't quite fit. I am part of about 20 people working heavily on the SilverStripe open source cms project and found several sections a real puzzle too...
I think the actual issue is that the open source community is huge, and is much like Emile Durkheim's analogy of society, it's a creature, with organs and muscles etc all performing diverse yet entirely complimentary tasks. I don't think its possible to survey the open source community at large in the way these questions asked. When government releases a census, careful thought goes into ensuring the questions make sense to ask to everyone, and there are always jumps and areas to skip depending on your answers. I think this open source survey should have broadly seperated people from project leaders, major developers, minor contributors, and users in terms of technical (e.g. a "user" of the php language, i.e. a programmer) or end-product (e.g. a user of sugarcrm or firefox). There are then others like community managers (Asa from Mozilla, who ran the Spread Firefox campaign). It could then ask specific questions to those different types of people.
In any case, the surprise to me in this survey was the unexpected jump into my salary, whether I was happy, and who I would consoul in times of depression. I just hope Lara has asked the same of some Microsoft zealots too :)
(Oh and that Richard Stallman adds his response so she gets the full spectrum of answers)
PHPSurveyor is now LimeSurvey!
PHPSurveyor has a new name - it´s now known as LimeSurvey
More info at:
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