From working toward his Masters Degree to video documentation of Free Open Source Software, Don has about enough time left to eat and sleep...
Not real heavy on the sleep part.
Don has worked with and helped The HeliOS Project on many levels, most recently he volunteered to lead the Install Team during the 2010 Linux Against Poverty event.
Don isn't just a user of FOSS and Linux...he's a True Believer. It's no wonder that his career choice followed that of his beliefs.
As part of their Graduate work, Don and his partner in this study, Iffat Jabeen have constructed a comprehensive survey.
If you are a Linux User or an IT professional using FOSS or Linux, this is a survey you might want to take. You can complete it in 10 minutes or so and it would greatly help Don and Iffat in completing their project.
Here is the general goal of the survey:
"This research study is being conducted by Don Davis and Iffat Jabeen, graduate students at Texas State University-San Marcos. The purpose of this research is to examine the role and possible benefits of legitimate peripheral participation and learning in the Gnu/Linux FOSS community."
You can find the start page for the survey here.
I would personally appreciate it.
All-Righty Then...
15 comments:
Ha! That did not take me nearly 8 minutes to complete!
Quite a few good and interesting questions, although I feel the emphasis on development is a bit unfair to me. ;) I am not a dev, but I am big into FOSS, et al. Some of us choose not to create but to use, which is just as important in my mind. If no one uses FOSS, or knows how to use it, what does it matter how good it is?
In any case, it was a good survey. More information is always better than less, right?
Hey Ken,
Any chance they are going to share the results of the survey when they are done? I'm curious to see the results :)
Anywho I took the time to take it and I relinked to it on the Ubuntu boards and the fan page for my Linux blog.
Cheers,
~Jeff
Short and simple
The way all surveys should be
@ Jeff
I will ask Don if he can publish the results...I am sure they will be published as a matter of his course work.
h
Thanks for the survey.
I agree with Gavin about the emphasis on development. It feels exclusionary and does not have to be. As RMS says, programming is something everyone can do but not everyone has to do excellently. A lot of information is lost by the focus of the questions. The community encompasses every free software user and a better user survey would catch details of what they accomplish outside of maintaining code.
For example, I filled in the "beginning user" bullet because all the other options were lumped in with official patch contribution. I'm a user, educator and advocate. I've taught people desktop use for eight years skills that I've acquired over ten years of exclusive GNU/Linux use. I've also written code, shell scripts and other stuff for myself that I've shared with others informally. Recently, I helped to kick start the "Call out Windows" campaign at Boycott Novell. I'm also lucky enough to use GNU/Linux every day at work and am helping the IT guy to migrate desktops.
You should list Australasia instead of Australia as a demographic. You're leaving out a lot of countries.
A comment section on the survey might be a nice addition... And while I don't generally provide patches or updates to other projects, I have developed several in-house solutions using FOSS for many smaller engineering problems. The main line FOSS projects are quite intimating for me... I'm an electrical engineer, and my programming skills are more tailored to simplistic methods rather than polished software development.
Done.
A comment on the survey. It doesn't provide any option other than "South America". Central America is NOT part of South America, nor is the Caribbean. We see ourselves as distinct from just "South of the Border". A little sensitivity, guys. Thanks.
It's interesting the software used for this FLOSS survey... IIS/6.0 ASP.NET
It's interesting the software used for this FLOSS survey... IIS/6.0 ASP.NET
Like a student can control what the school uses as a server...
h
I really enjoyed the graphic that was with this post :)
Like a student can control what the school uses as a server...
h
That's kinda the point of Don's survey, though. Schools, especially public institutions like TSU, should not be addicting students to Microsoft or any other proprietary company. It is also a waste of taxpayer dollars, given the existence of Apache on GNU/Linux and *BSD. Anonymous there makes a good point, bro.
Short and simple
The way all surveys should be
thank you
Good survey. FYI - There's a new survey on Linux in the Enterprise you may find interesting. They're going to publish the results in Sept. The survey closed 9/7:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W7YLF8B
Brian
Post a Comment