Open source hardware success?

Community General Discussion
1

Hi Arduinos!

If you got two minutes, please participate in the below questionnaire. It is part of a study on open source project success, and characteristics of open source projects like Arduino. The results will be posted on this forum, and I am sure they will be of interest.

http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=9koati3bzb2pdy263524

Your help is very much appreciated! If you have comments or questions, please feel free to post them in here.

Thanks
/Anders Matthiessen

2

What organization / school is this coming from?

I don't mind sharing but some of the questions are rather restricted imho so I have some doubts about the survey

3

I am a student at University of Southern Denmark. Can you explain what you mean by 'restricted'?

4

1*
Which projects do you participate in?
MakerBot
RepRap
MidiBox
Arduino
Sparkfun
Other (Please Specify):

Arduino is a project but sparkfun is a company, not sure about the other 3, it sounds a bit like comparing apples and pears. The open nature of the last option can give you a dozen names that might be meaningless to you so how would you classify them. So the value of the answer is restricted in its use.

It would have started with some more quantitative questions:

  1. do you participate in open source hardware. Y/N

  2. do you participate in programming platform - robotic platform - ...

  3. how many projects are you participating in

  4. how many projects have you done

  5. how many were succesful, why (your Q3..6)

  6. do you participate on discussion forum (your Q2)

It is not 100% clear for me from the description what you want to learn or what insight you want to get (but that may be on purpose)

5

robtillaart:
Arduino is a project but sparkfun is a company, not sure about the other 3, it sounds a bit like comparing apples and pears. The open nature of the last option can give you a dozen names that might be meaningless to you so how would you classify them. So the value of the answer is restricted in its use.

Yes, i am trying to compare apples to pears :slight_smile: - or rather, looking on different approaches to open source hardware development.

6

I completely agree with robtillaart. I don't see how you could get any useful data from this survey. You should reconsider how you structured it.