Hi Mahmoud, On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 3:35 PM, Mahmoud Khodier <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello everyone, > We are conducting a research on FLOSS at Technical University of Berlin, and > under supervision of "Mirko Boehm". We are interested in finding out what > initially motivated individuals to join, contribute to, and remain in FLOSS > projects. > > We would appreciate your collaboration by filling out this survey (takes few > minutes only): > > Online Survey for Open Source Contributors
Starting to fill this out, but... .. a few questions, though: this is at least the fourth survey about Free Software contributor motivation I personally have seen in the last two years, and I just wonder: * Why yet again the same survey under a different umbrella? * Aren't those existing survey results published and shared and freely available?** * What exactly is the aim of this particular survey that has not already been answered numerous times before? * Wouldn't a meta-analysis of all the already existing surveys out there be more profitable? Might be slightly more work as you would have to dig out the results, but that is doable quite easily and might also give an insight of the motivation evolution over time... Understand me well, I do not want to denigrate the usefulness of any of these surveys or of your work, but what, from the purely scientific POV, can you gain from yet another survey with pretty much the same questions as all those answered already by the same panel of people? It is not like you will get much different answers than we already gave before, and the people who answer those surveys are mostly the same, so not really a broader perspective. Please enlighten my unskilled mind (I have a natural science background, so I know a thing or two about statistics, just not in that field). All surveys I have seen so far were either for bachelor or seminar works (undergraduate both), so what is there to gain in a master study program from such a survey? Regards, Myriam ** I very much hope so, as Free Software contribution is also about openness and about "standing on the shoulder of giants", so re-using already done work is a good idea, IMHO. As long as you indicate all your sources and give credit where credit is due, there is much to gain from the insight other people have gathered already, and it avoids the reinvention of the wheel and a NIH attitude. -- Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org Please don't send me proprietary file formats, use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300) _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
