[Forwarding without prejudice -- Raju] This is an RFC 1153 digest. (1 message) ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: "FLOSSpols" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Open Source Software: developers survey Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 13:30:09 +0100 Dear FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) participant, Two years ago, the University of Maastricht (the Netherlands), carried out the FLOSS developer survey supported by the European Union. This was the first survey that provided deep insights in the international FLOSS community, its beliefs, and its functioning. Although this study has been pathbreaking for many research activities in the following years, some very important questions regarding this phenomenon remained unanswered so far. The original FLOSS survey and follow up FLOSS-US (Stanford) and FLOSS-Japan/FLOSS-Asia (Mitsubishi Research) showed that "Learning new skills" was the most common reason provided by developers for their community participation. Another significant finding of surveys is that there are far fewer women in FLOSS development than in software development as a whole. In this two-part survey, once again supported by the European Union, we would like to find out, first, how learning is organised and perceived within the FLOSS community and, second, to understand better the role of women within the community. For this purpose we rely heavily on your support, because you and your colleagues are the only ones who have the experience and expertise to help us revealing a realistic and appropriate picture of the community. Therefore we would like to ask you to fill in the following questionnaire. The more FLOSS developers respond, the better and more accurate the survey results. FLOSSPOLS is a scientific project that is financed by the European Commission and carried out by the University of Maastricht and the University of Cambridge. It serves exclusively purposes in the public interest, especially the provision of support for European policies towards Open Source and Free Software. The information you provide will be kept strictly confidential, and nobody outside the FLOSSPOLS research team will have access to personalised data. Moreover, all results we publish will ensure that the identification of persons who have replied to the questionnaires will be impossible. If you are younger than 18 years, we would like to draw attention to the fact that surveying of underage persons is a sensitive ethical issue in the EU framework. However, we acknowledge that many members of the FLOSS community are quite young. If you are underage, we would like to recommend that you carefully consider the purpose of our survey, as stated in this letter, before filling it out. You can start the survey by clicking on the link: http://flosspols.org/survey/survey_dev.php?id=460&key=D4Via If you have further questions or comments on this topic do not hesitate to contact us. The FLOSSPOLS team University of Maastricht the Netherlands ------------------------------ End of this Digest ****************** -- Raj Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
