This document outlines our approach to sampling survey respondents both on, and off GitHub.com.
The goal of this survey is to create a dataset of and for the open source community. Quoting from the design principles document:
The universe of this study is anyone who uses or otherwise engages with open source technology and development, whether passively or actively through contributions. This is a broader definition of this community than commonly employed, and we believe one of the major contributions of this study will be a dataset that allows for exploration of open source consumers alongside contributors.
In other words, we want to sample as many different open source communities as possible.
A small percentage of randomly selected visitors (either logged in or logged out) to licensed open source repositories on GitHub.com will be enrolled in the sample. They will be presented with a dialog inviting them to take the survey. To preserve anonymity, we’re not recording data about which users take the survey.
We are inviting as many open source communities as possible to participate. If you would like your community to participate in the survey, please fill out this form. When the survey launches, we will send you a template email for you to share with your community.
Email template:
Subject: Take the Open Source Survey
Hello!
As a member of the {{Community Name}} community, you are invited to participate in a survey about how people use and think about open source software. Whether you're a long-time maintainer, a new contributor, or an interested browser, we want to hear from you.
This survey will take 10-15 minutes. All questions are optional. Your anonymous answers will be released as part of an open data set that is freely available to researchers and members of the community to better understand the people who use and create open source technologies. No personally identifiable information will be solicited, and will remove any that is provided before publicly releasing the data.
Please take 10-15 minutes to share your perspective by {{date 2 weeks from now}}.
https://link/to/survey/for/offsite/populationThank you for your time and input. If you have any questions or feedback please email opensource@github.com. For more information or to subscribe to updates, visit http://opensourcesurvey.org/.
Each community will be sent a URL with a unique identifier. Please do not share this URL on social media or any medium that includes people that are not involved in your community. The survey is intended for people that have demonstrated an interest in open source and have a connection with the community.
This identifier will be used to ensure the response rate is expected given the size of the community. In the event that the response rate from a community greatly exceeds the expected community size (e.g. a survey URL is published to social media or some other medium that solicits responses from people who are not actively engaged in the community), answers from this community will be omitted from the results to ensure the data set represents the intended population.
Responses originating from the same community may be linked by an anonymized identifier (e.g. 'offsite_community_01'), but the names of the communities will not be identified in the released data set due to privacy concerns.
If you have a way of delivering the survey directly to members of community, such as a mailing list, then please use that instead.
If you don't have a way of contacting community members directly, or it is not inclusive of the entire community, then a public forum is acceptable as long as it is specific to the people that are involved in your community. Avoid sharing it on forums that have a cross section of people from other communities.