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Open Projects community survey

I’d like to introduce you to my latest university project – studies on Motivation of Open Projects Volunteers.

I have spent a lot of time, with help from many of my friends, shaping it and polishing to the current form. I believe that it’s an ultimate opportunity to learn how the volunteers operate, what are their motivators and satisfactors and what are the core requirements for a successful open project.

For the needs of this survey, I coined a term “open project” to distinguish it from from FLOSS, OSS etc., raise above it and cover all activities that people consider open and coherent with the vision of various aspects of FLOSS community, be it kernel, FSF, Mozilla, Open Street Map project, OSCar, OGP, OpenMoko, Wikipedia etc.

So, if you feel you volunteer in any open project, please, help me by completing this survey! If you’re working with any open project communities, please spread the word about this survey! If you wish, I may profile the results for your project so that you can know better what’s the profile of volunteers in your project comparing to the average!

I emailed some community managers that I have email addresses of, but I really want it to reach wide audience.

So please, if you can blog about, digg it, send link to the survey to your community mail-list, forum, newsgroup it’ll be a great help!

Digg!

4 replies on “Open Projects community survey”

I don’t like these questions. It is also too long, with an unknown benefit.

‘How would you describe the project management style?’ Those answers need work. I don’t know all the various single words. Please don’t assume I’ll Google for them, provide descriptions.

‘initial emotional response’.. too many

‘Have a soft heart’, etc.. I am not going to fill in my profile!

further, it assumes someone participates in just one project.

Heh, that list of personal beliefs restating the same question slightly differently each time was pretty comprehensive. I’m interested, is there a theory/methodology for getting the most value from that – how people answer positively phrased questions differently than negatively phrased ones? (Just a wikipedia article or something you could link me to would be good.) 🙂

Also some nitpicky editorial comments on the introduction and a few of the question/answers, keeping in mind that I’m not a native English speaker myself either:
(…)

bkor:
“I don’t like these questions. It is also too long, with an unknown benefit.”

How do build this assumption? I believe I chose question set pretty carefully to get valuable answers.

“‘How would you describe the project management style?’ Those answers need work. I don’t know all the various single words. Please don’t assume I’ll Google for them, provide descriptions.”

That’s pretty ok. I’m not studying the projects, I’m studying people and their perspective. It may happen you don’t answer this questions. It’s ok.

“‘Have a soft heart’, etc.. I am not going to fill in my profile!”

It’s ok. I hope that most people will. As it’s written there, I’m building a simplified profile of the volunteer, and simple inclinations in characteristic is IMHO interesting thing.

“further, it assumes someone participates in just one project.”

it does not. Second question is “Are you involved in more than one open project?”, and in case you say “yes”, on the next page you get a note asking you to select one project and refer to it.

“I’m interested, is there a theory/methodology for getting the most value from that – how people answer positively phrased questions differently than negatively phrased ones?”

Sure. I can recommend you an amazing book on social psychology, by E. Aronson “The Social Animal”. It gives you very complete guide through the current state of knowledge. I didn’t find any wikipedia articles about it, but he describes for example a difference in how people perceive a person described as “intelligent, smart, enthusiastic, devoted, strong, sharp, stubborn, bossy, frustrating” comparing to “frustrating, bossy, stubborn, sharp, strong, devoted, enthusiastic, smart, intelligent”. The results are VERY different. Same with sentence shaping. Mr. President, we’re facing epidemic. 600 may die. We can do A and save 200, or do B and there’s 1/3 chance that we will save all of them, and 2/3 that all will die. Which would you choose A or B?
And then, another scenario. The same threat, but this time, mr. President, you hear that if we’ll do A, 400 people will die, if we do B, there’s 1/3 we’ll save all of them, and 2/3 chance that 600 people will die. Which scenario you’d choose this time?

There are many more like this 🙂

“Also some nitpicky editorial comments on the introduction and a few of the question/answers”

Thanks!

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