Planning to announce 2023 Debian Project survey next week

Dear Debian Publicity, Debian Planet and Debian Outreach teams:

We are planning to launch next week a follow-up to our 2016 survey of the Debian community. This new survey will run from Wednesday 1 November to Thursday 30 November so ideally we would like to start publicising it on Tuesday or Wednesday next week.

If you are interested to test the survey you can do so here until Friday this week (we can extend if helpful):

https://dcpc.limesurvey.net/382488?lang=en

We are hoping you will support this project and help us disseminate the announcement we prepared (see below). For lists: one of us is a member of Debian-Project so can post it there, do you have any suggestions of where else it could go?

Thanks for any suggestions, and please let us know if you would like more information!

Best,

Mathieu and Xiaolan

cc-Zack, Molly

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The 2023 Debian Project survey: Sustainability will be launched on November 1, 2023!

Thanks again to all the participants in the 2016 Debian Project survey. An astounding 1,479 people responded to this first edition. The 2016 survey results are available in an open-access report published in 2021: 2016 Debian Project survey: Work and volunteers.

We (researchers Mathieu O’Neil, Sebastien Broca, Xiaolan Cai, Angela Daly, Molly de Blanc, Cecilia Rikap, Sebastien Shulz and Stefano Zacchiroli) are now following up with a new survey, for three reasons.

1-We want to track the project’s evolution since 2016: what has changed, what remains the same when it comes to roles, contributor characteristics and the presence of paid work in the project.

2-We want to focus on the economic sustainability of Debian and FOSS, in the context of threats to openness posed by new mechanisms such as Software as a Service and potential threats to sustainability such as ‘free riding’. What should happen so that FOSS projects continue to be maintained appropriately?

3-We are interested to find out what the community thinks about the environmental impacts of FOSS development, and possible ways to reduce these impacts.

We want to hear from as many Debian contributors as possible—whether you've submitted a bug report, attended a DebConf, reviewed translations, maintained packages, participated in Debian teams, or are a Debian Developer. Completing the survey should take 10-20 minutes, depending on your current involvement with the project.

About the survey:

We are using LimeSurvey, an online survey platform developed with free and open source code.
Survey responses are anonymous, IP and HTTP information are not logged, and all questions are optional. As it is still likely possible to determine who a respondent is based on their answers, results will only be distributed in aggregate form, in a way that does not allow deanonymisation.
The results of the survey will be analyzed as part of ongoing research work by the organizers. A report discussing the results will be published under a DFSG-free license and distributed to the Debian community as soon as it's ready.
The raw, disaggregated answers will not be distributed and will be kept under the responsibility of the organizers.

We hope you will fill out the Debian Contributor Survey. The deadline for participation is: November 30, 2023.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us via email at:

Mathieu O’Neil mathieu.oneil@canberra.edu.au

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