I agree that pie charts have a several drawbacks. I simply wanted here to give a rough ideas about proportions.
This post is just some quick summary of the temporary results (after one week). When I compile the final results and write a post about them, I will make sure to use appropriate graphs and will also provide more relevant information.
]]>You can still participate
If you have not filled in the survey yet, there is still time to participate. The survey will be live until October 22 and can be completed by any Perl contributor who joined the Perl community within the last two years.
The survey can be found HERE.
An older blog post provides some further details about the research project.
Some preliminary results
Here are some of the results drawn from the dataset collected during the first week of the survey.
Number of survey participants:
43 people took part in the survey so far (thank you again). 7 of the 43 people reported to have attended at least one Perl community event and 2 people went through some sort of mentoring while becoming contributors.
A wide array of roles was mentioned by the participants: ranging from users, testers, or developers to module authors,maintainers, or release managers.
44% of respondents had no FOSS experience when joining Perl whereas 37% reported to have 3 years or more of FOSS experience (the rest of the respondents falling somewhere in-between).
The participants reported to personally know between 5 and 6 individuals from which they can ask project-related information and reported to have 2 Perl members that they consider to be friends.
Involvement in Perl projects
On average, the participants reported to be currently involved in about 2 projects (ranging from 1 to 7 projects).
Reasons for joining Perl
Respondents were asked to report up to three reasons why they decided to join the Perl community. So far, the results showed some variation with 'learning new skills' and 'being intellectually challenged' being the first two motivations that came out.
Quick conclusion
Some projects are still under-represented such as Perl 6, Mojo, or Moose. Newcomers working on those sub-projects are encouraged to take part in the survey as this would provide some interesting additional insights.
More detailed results will be presented in about a week or two, once the survey is finished.
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The purpose of the research is to work out how newcomers to a FOSS community become valued sustainable contributors.
You can complete the survey via my university's survey platform. For more detail on the project aims, see below.
What is the project about?
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.
Citizenship behaviors in FOSS communities
The first assumption that motivated this project is that attracting new members has become crucial for a large majority of FOSS communities but this is not a sufficient condition to ensure the success and prosperity of a project.
Suppose a community manages to get 50 new members per month and suppose a large number of them do not comply to the code of conduct, commit changes without considering the people or modules/components being affected by the commits, do not attend or contribute to any of the community events, and do not assist any other members when they seek for help … Down the line, the health of the community is going to be affected and the future of the project seriously jeopardized.
So, yes … it is important to attract newcomers but a community needs to make sure that a certain proportion of these newcomers become ‘good’ contributors from the community perspective. ‘Good’ in the sense that they shall contribute to the well-being and growth of the community. ‘Good’ as good community citizens.
What do newcomers really experience?
Keeping all that in mind, FOSS projects have thus to do a good job at ‘socializing’ their newcomers and turning them into contributors. Doing a good job here means that FOSS projects shall ensure that they help generate those citizenship behaviors from newcomers by designing appropriate newcomer programmes and procedures.
FOSS projects rely on a large array of initiatives to facilitate the integration of newcomers. The Google Summer of Code is an obvious example of such initiative, but there are many more such as the use of newcomer resources (e.g. tutorials), newcomer sub-communities, formal/informal mentoring, sponsorship…
However, it seems that the other side of the coin is less understood by communities: the actual experience of newcomers.
How are the contributions and the behavior of a new member affected if he or she has received formal mentoring by one or several experienced members? What about if the new member has been actively involved in a newcomer sub-community? How important is the support of a community towards its newcomers? These are some of the questions I am trying to answer.
What’s in it for Perl?
The data you provide will help gain insights about the experience of newcomers within the Perl community. In addition, it will allow to understand how to design effective newcomer initiatives to ensure that Perl will remain a successful and healthy community.
About the survey
This survey is anonymous, and no information that would identify you is being collected. I expect the survey to take around 20 minutes of your time.
The results will also be used to improve the survey before it is later administered to contributors from other FOSS projects.
The survey is available at:
https://limesurvey.sim.vuw.ac.nz/index.php?sid=89971&lang=en
It will be available until Monday, 22 October, 2012.
If you know members of the Perl community who you think would be interested in completing it, please do not hesitate to let them know about this research.
I will post news about my progress with this research, and the results on my blog. Don't hesitate to contact me at kevin.carillo@vuw.ac.nz or kevin.carillo@gmail.com.
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