Retiring [or laid/pissed off] engineer's survey - draft

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Bryan Bishop

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Nov 12, 2008, 12:26:02 AM11/12/08
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Hi all,

In my last message I mentioned a basic outline for a survey to hand to
retiring engineers to assess their interest in contributing to open
manufacturing projects. The purpose of the survey is to get a metric
on interest, enthusiasm, support, and understanding the mechanisms of
public, shared design, collaborative approach to engineering. Opening
questions should gauge metrics like how long he/she has been employed,
their industry or job, title, simple things like that, and then move
on to the number of "system projects" that they either designed, built
or supervised in their career, and then move on to some more 'radical'
questions.

Specifically the questions should be geared towards assessing whether
or not retiring engineers are fit and able to contribute to open
source or "shared design" engineering projects using modern, mostly
non-commercial technologies. Although engineers are technically
inclined, there's easily the possibility for a disconnect between
collaborative internet technologies, such as public repositories and
revision control systems, and the paper and pen styles that left much
to physical labor in the copying room back in what I would consider
close-kin to the dark ages.

Skill questions should assess things like: drafting, CAD tool useage
(and if so, hours, packages that they've used), programming experience
(languages, platforms, "too many to count"), whether or not they know
what "wiki" is (this is not necessarily good/bad), whether or not they
have ever used a revision control system, whether or not they
contribute or donate to public software (i.e., linux, BSD licensed
works, etc.), things of this nature.

I was wondering if anyone would like to submit some of the survey
questions. Later, in a few days, perhaps a week, I'll throw this up on
to surveymonkey or some other surveying website, and then we can
diffuse through the social networking websites in an attempt to get
college students to hand it off to their parents or something. I'd
also be willing to push it as a 'research project' for the design lab.

Let's start with 10 to 20 questions, and try for 100 participants over
age 50 (?), and then see what recommendations, conclusions or
interesting trends we can push to AP.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
512 203 0507

Nathan Cravens

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Nov 12, 2008, 1:02:31 AM11/12/08
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Hi Bryan,

Would you create a wiki or gdocs and list that here? That would help the survey efforts.

Nathan

Bryan Bishop

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Nov 12, 2008, 1:03:55 AM11/12/08
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On 11/12/08, Nathan Cravens <knu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Would you create a wiki or gdocs and list that here? That would help the
> survey efforts.

http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Retiring_engineer_survey

- Bryan

Paul D. Fernhout

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Nov 12, 2008, 4:43:53 AM11/12/08
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Bryan-

Your survey could really tell us a lot of interesting information.

As a question to add, perhaps something like, "How interested are you in
learning new technologies at this point?"

Or: "Could you write something about a recent experience you had learning a
new technology?"

But similarly, one could ask, "Can you tell us what you think the most
important things are for any new engineer to learn? How did you learn these
things?"

Getting the survey up there is one thing, getting anyone to fill it in is
another. I'm not sure how to recruit for the survey.

You may find you learn more about people and their concerns with a narrative
approach, and my wife conveniently has written a free online book about that:
"Working with Stories"
http://www.workingwithstories.org/
I don't mean to discourage you from starting simple, but if you want to go
from that at some point, that book is a free resource. (She's a better
writer than me, too. :-)

From the intro: "When you work with stories, you can ask people to tell
stories about their experiences related to some subject of importance to you
(and usually to them), and you can also ask them to answer some questions
about those stories. When you do these things, you can find out things and
make things happen that wouldn't be possible otherwise."

In short, you can do story-related things in your survey like:
* Tell a real engineering story or a real web anecdote (not made up) and
ask them some questions about it.
* Ask the engineer to tell a story about a topic (as I did up above).
* Present the engineer with a story (a paragraph) and ask them if it
reminds them of a story in his or her own life.

One thing to be aware of is not to ask too many questions. Everyone does,
but you might get the best results if you cleary define what the goal of the
survey is and ask only three or so narrative related questions.

I think you can assume almost any retired engineer or designer or
draftsperson is "fit and able" to do a lot of stuff. Maybe a bigger issue is
to find out what motivates them? So, a question like: "Can you tell about a
time when you got really excited about an engineering project?"

And maybe something that gets at the issue of: "What would it take to get
you that excited about a project done as a volunteer using the internet?"

Anyway, I'll think on this survey idea of yours some more. You might want to
think of it as a process. Ask the survey of some people. Look at the
results. Then refine the survey. Include a question something like "What
question do you think we should have asked a retired engineer?"

It might be better to have a few focused surveys than one long one, too --
each focused on some particular issue of interest and asking only three to
five narrative-like questions.

Another reason to consider narrative is that if you get only a handful of
people to take the survey, they will give you more general insight than some
numbers (high low) or lists.

Anyway, rather than think about the actual questions, it seems most
important to think about what an open manufacturing project might need to
know about working with retired engineers. What are they interested in? What
motivates them? How much time a week might they want to put in? Would the be
excited or dismayed by learning new things? What would they consider a
successful use of their time? Would they rather be learning new things or
teaching old things, or both? What would get them to be willing to recruit
another retired engineer to work on the same or a similar project? Do they
care more about what they work on or how they work on it? Do they need an
alignment of any social/political goals with their volunteer work, or are
they just happy to be doing something they know? What size groups are they
comfortable working in? How much have they collaborated with others via the
internet or via email instead of face to face? And so on. I'm not saying to
ask all those things specifically; I'm just putting them out as things to
think about in crafting the goals of a survey.

Anyway, I don't know at what point a survey looks like a job application.
:-) These are all individual people who may or may not want to help various
projects along in their own way (the herding cats thing). I think it more
essential to find out (for ourselves) the basics about motivation, and also
calibrate across the diversity of engineers to get a feel for what is
possible. Of course, some of that might be answerable by existing studies?
It might be worth asking someone at NASA or SCORE or some other such
organizations what non-individual information they know about their retirees
as a group that they would be willing to share (like median years of
experience, range of tools they worked with, typical number of major
projects in a career, etc.) assuming any of that stuff makes sense to discuss.

Also, it would be interesting to think about what is different and what is
the same from general issues with collaborating with others on free and open
source software projects, like outlined in this book my wife just got and
which I have been looking at:
"Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software
Project" by Karl Fogel
http://www.amazon.com/Producing-Open-Source-Software-Successful/dp/0596007590

I just did a Google searh on "surveys of engineers retirement" and this was
a top link:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5350/is_/ai_n21447483
"A market survey of the retirement needs of engineers and scientists
completed in early summer showed that a significant market exists for a
properly designed occupational retirement plan. The survey was conducted
under the auspices of the American Association of Engineering Sodeties (AAB)
and overseen by a group led by AIChE president Gerhard Frohlich. Ten
engineering and scientific societies paid for the survey. "

I'm not saying that specific survey would help us, but it's an example of
people really doing such a survey in a big way. But I think something the
size you outline could be very helpful in sounding the depth of the waters.
And for us all to learn something (especially if you got some good stories
out of it for us to think about). Maybe there needs to be a preamble, that's
also a bit of awareness raising for the open manufacturing cause (just a
couple of sentences explaining about open manufacturing and the interest in
finding out more about how groups doing such work could make the most out of
the involvement of retired engineers)?

Finally, among lots of other issues, you need to think about the
confidentiality of the survey. Might it be best to tell people their
comments would be published to a web site and discussed in an email group?
How would that change the results? But I'm sure we'd all like to look at any
good stories that gave insight into working well with retired engineers.

--Paul Fernhout

Paul D. Fernhout

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Nov 12, 2008, 3:56:44 PM11/12/08
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Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> Anyway, I'll think on this survey idea of yours some more.

Bryan-

OK, I've talked with my wife on this survey issue. Some comments from that:

It might make sense to think of at least two different surveys.

One is about engineering retirees and how they might feel about volunteering
on open manufacturing projects.

The other is about how open manufacturing tools (OSCOMAK, SKDB, Appropedia,
LUF 2.0, Wikipedia, WikiHow, or whatever) could have helped them at key
times in their careers.

Her free online book has a little on interviewing experienced professionals.
She points out that to me they have a lot they can say, but often little
time, and to get the most out of their participation, asking for stories and
anecdotes can work really well. From:
http://www.workingwithstories.org/knowingyourtopic.html
"If you want people to talk about things that happened over a long period of
time, you will need different techniques than if you are asking about
shorter time scales. People remembering long spans of time, like careers,
tend to generalize a lot and may need help selecting particular experiences
to talk about. Best-worst questions can help with this, as can exercises. "

So, asking about career highs and career lows could be interesting. Or
asking about any big surprises in their careers.

On the open manufacturing side, asking something like "can you tell of an
experience you've had in your career where you a vital piece of information
somehow made a big difference in a project (either because you learned it at
the time or because you did not learn it until afterwards)?"

She suggests as a general format perhaps an introduction and four sections.

At the very beginning is, of course, an introduction about why you are
asking the survey (to learn more about people who might want to volunteer on
open manufacturing projects, or to learn more about what free and open
source tools and knowledge might help engineers enjoy their work more, etc.)
and how long it should take to fill out.

The first section would have about five questions about the engineer (length
of career, technologies worked with, how long they have been retired, the
size of the enterprise or industry they mainly worked with to get a sense of
their independence, etc.).

Then have three more sections that each ask for a story using a different
leading question, and ask five questions on each story they entered.

For balance, ask for one positive experience, on negative experience, and
one related to the topic of most interest (like motivation as a volunteer
perhaps?)

So, for example, let's say you asked a question of "What do you wish you had
known when you were starting out, and how would that have made a difference
in your early career?" Or to phrase that negatively, "What big or little
stupid thing did you do as a young engineer and how did you get over it?
What would you tell a young engineer to help avoid the mistake you made?" Or
more neutrally, "If you could go back to any point in your career and given
yourself one piece of information, what would it have been and how would it
have made a difference?"

Then you could ask about that story things to get at the origin, intent, and
interest, like:

* How do you feel about what you wrote?
Happy, Sad, Frustrated, Angry, Neutral, Amused, etc.

* Why did you pick that specific experience to tell?
to help, to make a point, it is significant to me

* How common do you think that experience is?
happens all the time ... once in a while ... once in a lifetime

* How recently did those events occur?
last year, two to ten years ago, ten to twenty, more than twenty

* What sort of technologies were involved with that story?
A checklist: CAD, CAM, email, drafting, books, etc. (This list needs work!)

These may not be the exact questions, this is a general layout. The point
is that when you have this data, you can then look for some trends. For
example, do engineers with big organizations show concern for different
issues? Do engineers with longer careers feel differently about volunteering
that engineers with shorter careers? Or something like that, since usually
the trends may surprise you and may not have been what you were looking for.

Also you need to tell people the results up on the web in an anonymous way
(if that is the plan). And you could add, please don't mention any specific
names of people or companies (or someone can scrub it anyway).

In general, in refining the survey, it's important to focus on refining goal
of why ask the survey? From that goal flows questions to understand more
about what the people involved are concerned about, what they feel about the
specific topic, and what sort of related situations they are familiar with,
and how they feel about all that.

From previous work my wife has done on volunteer issues, she's found there
is a split between people who volunteer for the social connections and to
help others, and those who volunteer to change the world. So, some questions
to assess that balance among retired engineers and their volunteer work
could be interesting as well. For example, would they prefer to be doing
design work themselves or mentoring young designer?

She said more, but I can't read all my hastily scribbled notes, and I hope I
got this much right on four hours of sleep. :-)

--Paul Fernhout

Bryan Bishop

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Nov 12, 2008, 4:38:10 PM11/12/08
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On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 3:43 AM, Paul D. Fernhout
<pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> Your survey could really tell us a lot of interesting information.

I was in the Manufacturing and Design Lab and just did a browser
battle stand-off with the grad students, and I totally lost when Opera
crashed at 400 tabs. Consequently I also lost the draft email that I
was writing here, so let's see if I can't quickly summarize my core
responses.

Excitability & specialized niche interests are a good focus,
especially in relation to the story idea. Although quantitative survey
results would be nice, and would be pretty when graphed, I suspect the
narrative approach would show more insight. While it would be nice to
survey firms and recent retirees, there are alumni societies at
universities with easily accessible retired individuals in a giant
database, many of which are friendly (else they'd ask not to be
disturbed).

> I'm not saying that specific survey would help us, but it's an example of
> people really doing such a survey in a big way. But I think something the
> size you outline could be very helpful in sounding the depth of the waters.
> And for us all to learn something (especially if you got some good stories
> out of it for us to think about). Maybe there needs to be a preamble, that's
> also a bit of awareness raising for the open manufacturing cause (just a
> couple of sentences explaining about open manufacturing and the interest in
> finding out more about how groups doing such work could make the most out of
> the involvement of retired engineers)?

I would also like to see a preamble/intro setting up context. I
suspect that a good mix would be something straight off of the
Creative Commons website or twobits.net, like "Free Software is a set
of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source
code that is made openly and freely available through an
unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty shows how these specific
practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation,
dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge after the
arrival of the Internet. Two Bits also makes an important contribution
to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by
demonstrating how Free Software is a "recursive public" public
organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very
infrastructure that gives it life in the first place." Particularly
the aspect of organizing around the abilities to build and augment.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

Bryan Bishop

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Nov 12, 2008, 4:47:17 PM11/12/08
to openmanu...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Paul D. Fernhout
<pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> One is about engineering retirees and how they might feel about volunteering
> on open manufacturing projects.
>
> The other is about how open manufacturing tools (OSCOMAK, SKDB, Appropedia,
> LUF 2.0, Wikipedia, WikiHow, or whatever) could have helped them at key
> times in their careers.

I don't understand the second one, in the sense that without using
those tools how would they know if they could have possibly been of
earlier assistance? "Here's a moderately lengthy explanation of what a
wiki is; would this have been of assistance to you? How about a
computerized material lookup table instead of the classic Materials
Selector?" Is that what you're going for?

> On the open manufacturing side, asking something like "can you tell of an
> experience you've had in your career where you a vital piece of information
> somehow made a big difference in a project (either because you learned it at
> the time or because you did not learn it until afterwards)?"

Ah, okay. In the software sectors this is always of the type that "if
I only had such and such license for such and such software," and
related woes.

<snip set of questions>

> In general, in refining the survey, it's important to focus on refining goal
> of why ask the survey? From that goal flows questions to understand more
> about what the people involved are concerned about, what they feel about the

I have trouble convincing for-profit individuals that there's such
things as F/OSS out there. This makes the survey particularly hard to
structure and format, but I'm sure there's a good best-fit line
somewhere in between the different aspects.

> From previous work my wife has done on volunteer issues, she's found there
> is a split between people who volunteer for the social connections and to
> help others, and those who volunteer to change the world. So, some questions
> to assess that balance among retired engineers and their volunteer work
> could be interesting as well. For example, would they prefer to be doing
> design work themselves or mentoring young designer?

Another question worth adding would be most admired design project.
I'm sure everyone has one of those, and that's always exciting to rant
about.

- Bryan

Paul D. Fernhout

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Nov 12, 2008, 6:41:35 PM11/12/08
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The key idea here is in the second quoted piece. The idea is not to present
OSCOMAK, SKDB, Appropedia etc. but rather to talk about the value they could
provide in an abstract way. Key here is probably the value of getting
information about how to make things when you want it, but other values are
being able to share a design, archive it, ask for feedback from peers on a
design, learn about a field in general from information written more clearly
that patents, and so on for whatever values we might identify in such
projects. So, for example: "Can you tell about a situation where peer review
of a design you were working on by people outside your company might have
made a big difference?". Or something like that, describing the abstract
value. Or "Can you tell of one situation where you were unable to talk to an
engineering peer you met at conference or outside of work and being able to
discuss the project might have made a big difference?" Or something along
those lines.

--Paul Fernhout

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