Hello, My name is Jan Fredrik Stoveland, and I am a masters student at the University of Oslo writing a thesis on firm-sponsored open source communities. openSUSE is the main case for the study. I have been granted permission to send you this email by Andreas Jaeger and Martin Lasarch, and I hope you do not mind receiving it. I would like to ask all of the members of the this mailinglist to participate in a brief, anonymous electronic survey targeted at active contributors in the openSUSE community. The research is funded by the University, and is independent of any commercial interests. The link to the survey is here: https://nettskjema.uio.no/answer.html?fid=38823&lang=en I have selected these mailinglists as the main community indicator: project, factory, buildservice, wiki and translation. It is of great importance to get valid answers from as many of you as possible. The questions in the survey concern your current engagement in the openSUSE community, your reasons for participating in the community and your affiliation with Novell. I expect the survey will take you 10 minutes to complete, unless you find any questions difficult to answer. What do you get in return for doing this? The results from the survey will be posted to the list within a month, and the thesis with other interesting findings about your community will be published around May next year. Hopefully this will be of interest to you. But first of all I hope you will contribute for the sake of research itself. Not too much academic research has been done on communities that are facilitated by partially-proprietary companies like Novell. Furthermore, I would like to do an in depth interview on the phone with a few of you to get more detailed answers. I will randomly select about 6 people to talk to. In addition I would appreciate to talk to any people that have additional opinions. So if you have something more to say after completing the survey, please send me an email! Thank you very much for your help! Jan Fredrik Stoveland Student of Sociology and Informatics University of Oslo, Norway --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org