flosspols survey

Dear all,

In the framework of the flosspols project we currently run a survey which 
focuses on the aspect of learning as well as the role/situation of women 
within the free/libre/open source software community (see announcment 
below). We are interested in the opinion of all kinds of contributors 
(developers, translators, documentors, promotor, etc.).

http://flosspols.org/survey/survey_part.php?groupid=blkkdw

It would be great if you could help us by (a) filling in the survey and (b) 
by forwarding it to people you know in the community. Up until now our 
sample contains around 3.5% women (which is about twice as much as female 
participants in floss). It would be great if we could include even more 
women, also to be able to carry out more reliable statistical analysis.

Thanks for your attention and for considering your support.

Best,
Bernhard


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Dear FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) participant:

In 2002, MERIT/Infonomics at 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 divisions, its diversity of 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 sponsored by the European Union, 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 
participants for their FLOSS activities. 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 - by which 
we mean the universe of all those who participate in FLOSS-related 
activities, regardless of their beliefs or degree of activity. We also want 
to understand better the role/situation of women within this broad 
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 participants - not only developers - respond, 
the better and more accurate the survey results.

FLOSSPOLS is a scientific project that is financed by the European 
Commission. 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. The FLOSSPOLS Team is cooperating with the Stanford 
NSF-funded project that conducted the FLOSS-US survey on questionnaire 
design, to minimise the number of questionnaires sent to participants.

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.

If you have further questions or comments on this topic do not hesitate to 
contact us (email: [email protected]).

Thank you for your support.

The FLOSSPOLS Research Team