General Request for Survey Input – Open Source/Free Software Satisfaction:
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and my research topic is an investigation of factors that influence participant satisfaction with library or information management free/open source software projects. Some library-related examples are DSpace, EPrints, Koha, Evergreen, Greenstone, and MyLibrary. More general information management software includes web content management software such as Drupal, wiki software such as MediaWiki or PmWiki, or blogging software such as WordPress.
If you use or are involved with a relevant project, I would like to invite you to complete an online survey. I am especially interested in hearing from people in a range of roles, for example user, developer, release manager, or system administrator. I am keen to have responses from people who have had either positive or negative experiences with free/open source software, to ensure that I get a perspective on factors that diminish satisfaction, as well as those that contribute toward it.
The results of this project will help developers of free/open source application software projects identify opportunities to increase user satisfaction, and it will also help users identify ways in which they might contribute to projects.
I expect the survey to take between 15 and 20 minutes of your time. You may receive several copies of this message, since I am sending it to a number of project and library technology email discussion lists; however, I ask that you only complete the survey once. If you have colleagues who you think would be interested in completing it, please forward this invitation to them.
The survey is available at:
http://surveys.sim.vuw.ac.nz/survey.aspx?surveyid=205
It will be available until Friday, 14 November 2008.
I will post a summary of the results to relevant project and library technology email discussion lists, once the thesis is finished in mid-2009. A copy of the thesis will be deposited in the Victoria University of Wellington Institutional Repository (http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/).
If you have any questions about this survey, please contact me at brenda.chawner@vuw.ac.nz or phone +64 4 463 5780. My supervisors are Professor Gary Gorman, email gary.gorman@vuw.ac.nz and Professor Sid Huff, email sid.huff@vuw.ac.nz.
Regards,
—
Brenda Chawner
School of Information Management
Victoria University of Wellington
P O Box 600
Wellington NEW ZEALAND
(04) 463 5780 fax (04) 463 5446 brenda.chawner@vuw.ac.nz