Page 1 of 1

Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS project

Posted: 2017-03-27 00:55
by tetris4
Hi everyone,

My name is Neofytos Kolokotronis, am a long time contributor to FOSS communities and am currently doing a research project investigating the relationship between Personality Types and the Sense of Community in FOSS projects as part of Psychology degree. The survey takes 5-6 minutes, consists mostly of multiple choice questions and it's configured to be completely anonymous. It will be available until at least April 7, 2017.

If you are an active member of the Debian community (or another FOSS community and happen to read this) I would greatly appreciate it if you took the time to complete it: https://openss.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_br0Nzb7UmfYU1EN

Feel free to ask me for further info or any other question you may have.

Thanks! :)

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-27 06:08
by millpond
tetris4 wrote:Hi everyone,

My name is Neofytos Kolokotronis, am a long time contributor to FOSS communities and am currently doing a research project investigating the relationship between Personality Types and the Sense of Community in FOSS projects as part of Psychology degree. The survey takes 5-6 minutes, consists mostly of multiple choice questions and it's configured to be completely anonymous. It will be available until at least April 7, 2017.

If you are an active member of the Debian community (or another FOSS community and happen to read this) I would greatly appreciate it if you took the time to complete it: https://openss.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_br0Nzb7UmfYU1EN

Feel free to ask me for further info or any other question you may have.

Thanks! :)
Your page is seriously flawed.

It starts out with a no-no redirect, and ends up on a page with nothing but javascript.

https://jfe-cdn.qualtrics.com/jfe3/static/aeb8e1
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/l ... 1.11.1.min
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/l ... type-1.7.1
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/core/Qualtrics
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/p ... irejs/text
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/watch
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/rivets
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/sightglass
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/peg
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/doT
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/factories/dialog
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/core/log
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/core/device
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/core/load
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/core/dom
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/core/shim
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/bowser
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/json2
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/jquery-ui
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/l ... y-ui-setup
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/touch-punch
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/l ... ash.custom
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/core/utils
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/bluebird
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/l ... xp-all-min
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/mout/src
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/l ... hael-2.1.4
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/moment.min
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/l ... mezone.min
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/libs/wtf-trace

This raises more red flags than a chicom invasion of Taiwan.

Plus it has an LSO attached.

My system wont load this page. A violation of its security.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-27 10:04
by tetris4
Hi millpond and thank you for your interest.

Unfortunately I doubt I am able to change much about this situation. Qualtrics is the software supported by the University and am only aware of being able to do some CSS modifications to it. Please have in mind am not a coder. What I did was to make sure to enable all privacy and anonymity options so I have no data on the participants, other than what they report themselves through the survey.

I already plan to include in my final feedback my comments on using proprietary tools and standards for the purposes of the module. Specifically to doing surveys, I know LimeSurvey exists as a FOSS alternative, which hopefully is less intrusive in the way you describe.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-27 14:06
by dasein
When you write up your results, it's probably worth mentioning the fact that security concerns over the survey software may have systematically excluded the most security-conscious candidate subjects from participating in the survey.

Any sort of potential systematic sampling bias is worth mentioning. And it's easy to imagine that security awareness is (or is strongly correlated to) a "personality" variable in some way.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-27 14:14
by bw123
Plus it has an LSO attached.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_shared_object

I fired it up on links2, and while it claims to require javascript, the form does seem to work, the survey begins after indicating consent. The forms seem to post.

I think you would get more participants if you let people know how the research could benefit the community.

Probably quite a bit of difference between your privacy policy and Qualtrics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualtrics

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-27 15:18
by tetris4
dasein wrote:When you write up your results, it's probably worth mentioning the fact that security concerns over the survey software may have systematically excluded the most security-conscious candidate subjects from participating in the survey. Any sort of potential systematic sampling bias is worth mentioning. And it's easy to imagine that security awareness is (or is strongly correlated to) a "personality" variable in some way.
That's a good point, thanks. It could actually be suggested as a topic for further study. Another issue that came up that could be acting in a similar manner is that some people hesitate to continue because I ask them to mention the community they are involved. They perceive this as asking them to judge their community and collect data on what people think about it. The only reason I ask this question is to be able to identify the diversity of the communities the participants are coming from (and am excited to see that's much higher than expected), but I can understand why someone would be suspicious of it. To tackle this I tried to include several warnings on this being optional.
bw123 wrote:I think you would get more participants if you let people know how the research could benefit the community.
Indeed I failed to mention that am interested in Community Management. The results of this survey could for example indicate that different approaches and tactics might be needed to enable participation and engagement of people in our FOSS communities that would be less inclined to get involved based on some specific characteristics of their personality. I could get into more details on the hypothesis but this might affect the responses, that is why I share some further info at the end of the survey and I am more than happy to share the results once my final report is completed.
bw123 wrote:Probably quite a bit of difference between your privacy policy and Qualtrics?.
I did check their privacy policy in advance to see what data they save. Unless I missed something, Qualtrics claims that if configured accordingly, it won't gather/save any identifying data on the participants. It recommends for example storing IP addresses to avoid duplicate reports, but I of course disabled that and other similar settings to enhance anonymity. Obviously I can in no way guarantee what they are actually doing, but only how I set it up to align with my (and most of us in FOSS communities) concerns.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-27 17:45
by debiman
millpond wrote:Your page is seriously flawed.

It starts out with a no-no redirect, and ends up on a page with nothing but javascript.

...

This raises more red flags than a chicom invasion of Taiwan.

Plus it has an LSO attached.

My system wont load this page. A violation of its security.
that in itself could be interpreted as an answer to the question posed.
could've been mine, so +1.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-28 01:00
by millpond
Assume that all university/college software is little more than corporate spyware. I have had one system putzed up by my wife's online section of a course. Needed to reinstall Win7.

Personaly I dont concern myself with privacy policies of websites. I assume that they all lie, as the users really have zero control over proprietary software they are using.

I have a VPN and Tor-Browser here, so I have no problems even with the DarkWeb. IP addresses are meaningless with them.

Keep in mind that Debian has had a reputation as being one of the more user unfriendly repos, though that prejudice is in reality no longer reasonable. Its no more or less user friendly than Ubuntu. However that preconception will itself throw somewhat of a bias in the results.

Ubuntu will throw an opposite bias, as typical users will be less technically oriented. The opposite extreme will be the Arch community.

Best advice for a researcher is to spend an afternoon learning the basics of MyBB forum software and set up a small site for discussion. The software will allow anonymous posting, and you can set the software to forbid anonymous users to post links (that will scare away most spammers).
Another option is to post the survey on usenet. Hells, bells, post it here.

Its important to keep in mind that FOSS is a religion with many, many denominations. Including its versions of unitarians and satanists.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-28 10:14
by tetris4
millpond wrote:Keep in mind that Debian has had a reputation as being one of the more user unfriendly repos, though that prejudice is in reality no longer reasonable. Its no more or less user friendly than Ubuntu. However that preconception will itself throw somewhat of a bias in the results.
Ubuntu will throw an opposite bias, as typical users will be less technically oriented. The opposite extreme will be the Arch community.
That's why am trying to collect data from a variety of projects, to minimize this bias. But as you can see it's not easy. :)

As a FOSS contributor and digital rights advocate myself I could predict most issues that would come up when I reached out to FOSS communities, but unfortunately could not do much about it. Yet I've learned lots of things through this effort to approach FOSS communities and thank you and everyone else for the feedback and suggestions. Hopefully I can make any future research project more approachable by satisfying these expectations.

Fwiw, am mostly interested in active members that are in some way or another contributing to a project and feel members of the Debian or another FOSS community, not the general end-user that will not identify on most levels with the project and its community.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-29 03:52
by millpond
Then probably the best venue for you would be mailing lists. It seems a favorite among developers for some reason or other. Google 'Devuan' for a good place to start as well for insights into those of us who have dissenting opinions on the general current direction of Linux. Gentoo is another - an older Linux fork, and probably with more professional programmers/developers.

Keep in mind that there is a wide definition of the term 'developer'. It can range from shell scripts to DEs. I have been involved in a couple of database FOSS projects, though I am far from being a programmer, for example. You have web site developers who have apparently never seen a line of code.

Re: Survey on Personality and Sense of Community in FOSS pro

Posted: 2017-03-29 12:08
by tetris4
Am not looking necessary for developers, just people that are in some way contributing to a project and feel part of its community. It could be just by being active on the forum, giving support to others, bug reporting and troubleshooting, translations, documentation, spreading the word etc.

I did consider mailing lists but I believed it would probably feel too intrusive for most communities. That is why I decided to go with forums or groups on social networks, where usually general discussion is more expected. I already had my post deleted or treated as a spammer by some and I more or less understand that. And I appreciate the acceptance and discussion here at Debian.