Hi everyone,

My name is Kevin Carillo. I am a PhD student currently living in Wellington (New Zealand) and I am doing some research on Free/Open Source Software communities.

If you have joined the Gentoo community after January 2010 (within approximately the last 3 years), I would like to kindly request your help. I am interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences.

The purpose of the research is to work out how newcomers to a FOSS community become valued sustainable contributors. I am basically studying how the experience of a FOSS community newcomer has an influence on this person's actions and project contributions in the community.

The survey has already gathered 250+ responses in less than 2 weeks and has been supported by the following projects: Debian, FreeBSD, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, NetBSD, OpenSUSE, Python, Ubuntu or Wikimedia.

The survey can be found at:
https://limesurvey.sim.vuw.ac.nz/index.php?sid=65151&lang=en

The survey is anonymous, and the dataset will be released under a share-alike ODbL license.

I will post news about my progress with this research, and the results on my blog: http://kevincarillo.org. Don't hesitate to contact me at kevin.carillo@vuw.ac.nz

You can also find some more information at:
https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/666038-survey-how-important-is-newcomer-experience-in-free-open-source-software-projects
https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/a-research-project-to-understand-what-does-it-take-to-retain-newcomers/
and also on the planets of the listed projects...

Thanks!


Kevin Carillo
School of Information Management
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600, Wellington NEW ZEALAND
(04) 463 5233 ext. 8679 | Room RH401
kevin.carillo@sim.vuw.ac.nz
http://kevincarillo.org/