Ubuntu Census Survey

2 minute read

Today Andreas Lloyd sent a email to the ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-users ubuntu mailing lists in order to gather information on the Ubuntu Linux Community and know a bit more about who is using, contributing…

Here is the mail, I would recommend to everybody using Ubuntu to go and fill the survey, this can be quite usefull.

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To all users and developers of Ubuntu,

To begin my announced anthropological fieldwork in the Ubuntu community [1], I have constructed a questionnaire to gather basic and relatively valid statistics on the community as whole. I call it a census survey since there’s no official register of people contributing to Ubuntu [2]. In spite of the name, the survey will not be used to keep track of individuals and their contributions to Ubuntu. Instead, the objective is to examine statistically the membership of the Ubuntu community:

    • Who are joining the Ubuntu community and for what reasons.
    • How they use computers in general.
    • How is their relationship to the F/OSS world in general.

I hope that as many members of the Ubuntu community as possible will find the time to fill out the questionnaire - this data will help give an overview of where the Ubuntu community is now, and hopefully make it clearer where it is going.

The questionnaire consists of 5 sections and a total of 65 questions (excluding the comment fields). It should take around 15 minutes to complete, depending on your level of involvement in the F/OSS world, and the number of comments that you find you want to add while filling out the questionnaire.

You can find the Survey Questionnaire here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=855442126391

All of the survey data I receive will be anonymized. Your name will only be used to file the questionnaire. Your privacy will be protected as according to usual anthropological practice [3].

I plan to have this data collected and analyzed to present the results to you at the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit in Paris in June, and I will of course make the relevant results available on-line afterwards.

Feel free to send me any questions or comments that you might have regarding this survey or my fieldwork in general.

Thank you very much for your help!

Andreas Lloyd - - https://launchpad.net/people/lloydinho

PS: Sorry for cross-posting - this is a necessary evil to reach as much of the Ubuntu community as possible, as the -announce mailing-lists are reserved for announcements critical to the entire community.

[1]: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2006-April/006113.html

[2]: At the moment of writing, there are 1270 Launchpad members who have signed the Code of Conduct, thus qualifying for the Ubuntero badge. But there is most certainly many other Ubuntu users and participants who haven’t signed the Code of Conduct, or who simply don’t use Launchpad.

[3]: http://ethics.iit.edu/codes/coe/aanta-1998.html

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So guys, don’t hesitate to go and have a look there.