Satisfaction with free/open source software: survey invitation
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and my research topic is an investigation of factors that influence participant satisfaction with library or information management free/open source software projects. Some library-related examples are DSpace, EPrints, Koha, Evergreen, Greenstone, and MyLibrary. More general information management software includes web content management software such as Drupal, wiki software such as MediaWiki or PmWiki, or blogging software such as WordPress. If you use or are involved with a relevant project, I would like to invite you to complete an online survey. I am especially interested in hearing from people in a range of roles, for example user, developer, release manager, or system administrator. I am keen to have responses from people who have had either positive or negative experiences with free/open source software, to ensure that I get a perspective on factors that diminish satisfaction, as well as those that contribute toward it. The results of this project will help developers of free/open source application software projects identify opportunities to increase user satisfaction, and it will also help users identify ways in which they might contribute to projects. I expect the survey to take between 15 and 20 minutes of your time. You may receive several copies of this message, since I am sending it to a number of project and library technology email discussion lists; however, I ask that you only complete the survey once. If you have colleagues who you think would be interested in completing it, please forward this invitation to them. The survey is available at: http://surveys.sim.vuw.ac.nz/survey.aspx?surveyid=205 It will be available until Friday, 14 November, 2008. I will post a summary of the results to relevant project and library technology email discussion lists, once the thesis is finished in mid-2009. A copy of the thesis will be deposited in the Victoria University of Wellington Institutional Repository (http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/). If you have any questions about this survey, please contact me at brenda.chawner@vuw.ac.nz or phone +64 4 463 5780. My supervisors are Professor Gary Gorman, email gary.gorman@vuw.ac.nz and Professor Sid Huff, email sid.huff@vuw.ac.nz. Regards, -- Brenda Chawner School of Information Management Victoria University of Wellington P O Box 600 Wellington NEW ZEALAND (04) 463 5780 fax (04) 463 5446 brenda.chawner@vuw.ac.nz
http://surveys.sim.vuw.ac.nz/survey.aspx?surveyid=205 It will be available until Friday, 14 November, 2008.
Will the full anonymised dataset be available under a free/open source licence? What are the licence terms for the institutional repository? We prefer to share effort with people who will share back in the same way. Thank you, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237
MJ (Slef), thanks for your questions. Will the full anonymised dataset be available under a free/open source licence? Your question has made me realise that I haven't thought enough about this aspect of my research. Under New Zealand's privacy legislation, the standard approach most researchers take is to state that the data will be stored securely for a specific period, used only for the purposes specified, and then destroyed; that's what I have said in the introduction to the survey. I am not aware of any local research that has collected data from people (as opposed to data from other types of research) where the dataset has been made available. Since I have not sought permission to make the raw dataset available, and a number of people have already completed the survey, I can't change the terms now. However, I will check with the chair of our Human Ethics Committee to find out if it would be possible to make an anonymised subset of the data available in some way. If not, then I will keep your comment in mind for any future research I do, and seek permission to make an anonymised version of the dataset available to others. What are the licence terms for the institutional repository? I can choose the licence for copy that will be deposited in the IR, and will choose a New Zealand Creative Commons license, which will be attribution, non-commercial, share-alike. But I have to finish the thesis first! I suspect my answer won't make you change your mind about completing the survey - but at least I've had my consciousness raised as a result of your question. Thanks again. -- Brenda Chawner Senior Lecturer & LIM Programmes Director School of Information Management Victoria University of Wellington P O Box 600, Wellington NEW ZEALAND (04) 463 5780 | fax (04) 463 5446 | Room EA201 | brenda.chawner@vuw.ac.nz
participants (2)
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Brenda Chawner -
MJ Ray