PhD Open Source survey

[dougal85]

I have a friend doing a phd she needs to do some research into open source software.

If you can spare a few minutes and are involved or have been with open source, please do the survey. More information below...

Dear All,
I am a PhD student in e-Business in Durham University (UK). My research topic is "Knowledge management and innovation in virtual organisations". The aim of my thesis is to assess how and to what extent knowledge is created, shared, and circulated in open source software communities. In my empirical studies I am collecting primary data from members/developers of OSS communities. I would be grateful if you could spend no more than 15 minutes to answer yourself and distribute among your colleagues in OSS communities my questionnaire. (URL: http://www.dur.ac.uk/zilia.iskoujina/qq.htm). There will be some prizes - after finishing the data collection, I will randomly select some respondents and send them gift vouchers for £20 from Amazon. Thank you very much for your time and cooperation. I greatly appreciate your help in contributing to this research endeavour.

[Sxooter]

I was kind of bothered that the survey focused so hard on coding.

There are lots of people who contribute to open source projects by bug chasing, or writing docs, or providing user support who don't really code a lot. Those categories were pretty much ignored in favor of the glorious coders. 🙂

[Weedpacket]

Not to mention the people who can't necessarily code for toffee but if you want a clean, useful and intuitive UI, stylish chrome, or effective branding then they're people you want on the team.