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: [link]
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.
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 [link] 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
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.