Surveys for DIY communities

Ever wanted to know what kind of cool stuff biohackers do? How about what’s the attitude towards external funding in different kind of DIY communities? Or what’s the most preferred way to handle space rent?

Now that’s possible to find out. For the past 3-4 years I’ve been studying (and participating) hackerspaces; motivations to participate and interests among members around the world. In January 2012 it occurred to me that perhaps other people wish to create surveys to find out stuff about the communities they either are involved or just out of curiosity. That’s why I created the domain ‘p4.ossoil.com’ with limesurvey platform.

Intention is to know more

In short, here’s a list of features and requirements.

• The domain is intended to be used by different kind of DIY communities such as hackerspaces, makerspaces, 100k garages, diybio and fablabs.
• Anyone can start creating a survey, conduct it and analyze results.
• We don’t believe hiding information resulting to better results.
• You can even create multi-language surveys pretty easily.
• Platform allows timed surveys and exports to several data formats (CSV, SPSS, R).
• We only require that the raw data will be accessible to all. In other words, we leave the data open for others to study and use.
• Does not use Google Forms or Docs.
• Survey responses can be anonymized
• All raw survey data will be linked to “Open Data” section (automation under work).

Not just surveys

The domain is not intended for just conducting the surveys. It is intended to be a place to find links to analyzed results (such as blogs, articles, tv shows) based on the surveys. Nothing of the latter is automated, at least not yet.

http://p4.ossoil.com

That’s it. So, if you or your community wish to make a survey about topics around ‘DIY’, contact me. More information can be found from the site http://p4.ossoil.com. 

Content is available under 2012, Jarkko Moilanen. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Related posts:

1. Developing Peer to Peer Community Surveys
2. P2 Generation Survey Site
3. Peer production communities survey 2011
4. Over 500 active hackerspaces