[ossig] Invitation to participate in FLOSSWorld survey

[Afrezal Tahrin <afrezal.oss@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Some
of you might have heard about the FLOSSWorld survey. As for some
brief introduction, FLOSSWORLD is a European
Union funded project involving 17 institutions from 12 countries
spanning Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, to undertake a
worldwide study on the impact of select issues in the context of
Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).  As you are aware, in the
recent years, FLOSS has gained considerable momentum across the world
and resulting in a wide interest from communities of developers,
software users, companies in IT and non-IT sector, governments, and
so on. A variety of high-quality software is today available as FLOSS
for a range of applications from healthcare to e-learning.
Comprehensive efforts to complete a sustainable eco-system are in
progress through establishment of trans-national projects, resource
centres, and other collaborative efforts. FLOSSWORLD is one dimension
of this flurry of activity, focussing on empirical studies of FLOSS
developers and users from different spheres. The studies will cover
topics such as  impact of being in a FLOSS community on career growth
and prospects, motivational factors in choice of FLOSS, perspectives
from user community towards FLOSS, inter-regional differences in
FLOSS development methodology, etc.  The project also aims to develop
an international community of interested people  in areas such as
FLOSS in education, FLOSS in e-government, etc. As for Malaysia, the survey will be covering 3 tracks with 5 questionaires which are;

1. Skills (Track 1) - Survey of FLOSS developers
2. Skills ( Track 1) - Survey of employers (HR managers at business)
3. Skills (Track 1) -Survey of universities and institutes of higher education
4. Software developer (Track 2) - survey of FLOSS project developers
5. Government (Track 3) - survey of FLOSS/ Open Standards in government

Currently, the questionaires are being finalised amongst the consortium members. Before it going live, we need some input and feedback from the local OSS community on the questions and to introduce, where appropriate any local terms to ensure International comparability - i.e using local currencies in the questionnaire and localised scales when asking about income or expenditure levels, introduction of additonal questions that are unique to each country´s context. These will be carefully designed and positioned, so that they do not reduce the international comparability of the rest of the questionnaire. This may include questions on the roles of specific government organisations, businesses, higher learning, local OSS projects and so forth.

The FLOSSWorld survey, we hope at least to become an indicator on our local OSS perception, usage and adoption as compared to other countries in the world.

Any of you who are interested to have a look on the questionaires, feel free to email me at afrezal AT mimos.my

I hope you will be able to spare some time for this effort despite your busy schedule of commitments. And I do look forward to receiving a positive response from you.

Best,
-- 
Afrezal Tahrin
Open Source 
MIMOS Berhad
Technology Park Malaysia
57000 Kuala Lumpur