On 22/04/2014 Storm-Olsen, Marius wrote:
As part of the research into a thesis on Open Source Organizational Culture, I want to send out a short survey to the Apache organization. However, given that the Apache community is so large, with numerous individual projects under its umbrella, I wanted to check with the community list first; both to seek explicit permission for doing so, and to figure out what would be the best way to send out such a survey without "spamming" the community. ... http://bit.ly/OSOCAS2014
Hello Marius, it seems we didn't manage to answer you so far, and your deadline is today... So I'll jump in.
Well, as chair of the Apache OpenOffice project, one of the most researched open source projects in history, I answer surveys aimed at analyzing correlations between free/open source software and anything (from politics to sports, from society to religion) almost every weekend, and I decided to stop.
Still, I gave a chance to your survey, and I found it unusually interesting. It is a survey that I would really like to be taken by all the OpenOffice volunteers, and by volunteers from all Apache projects in general. It focuses on four simple indicators (something like: community, innovation, competition, stability) and it asks everyone to evaluate the status of the project now and the ideal status of the project in 5 years according to these indicators, seen from multiple points of view (individual contributor, management...).
I believe that, for once, we have a survey that can be useful to the projects and not only to the student. We can even check with numbers whether our "Community over code" mantra is really perceived as such by contributors and whether it is considered an indicator for future success.
Please extend your deadline by two weeks, send the survey link to d...@openoffice.apache.org and I'll endorse your request. I encourage others to take your survey too (link above) and to consider advertising the survey on the dev lists of other projects if they find it equally interesting.
Regards, Andrea.
