Follow up to sincere request
Anthony Durity
First of all, thank you so much to everyone who has already replied.
Recently I put out a request for volunteers to answer a few questions.
I got some responses but considering there are 1331 (11^3 , an
auspicious number) members in this mailing list according to Google I
thought I would repeat my call. But this time I will attach the
questionnaire rather than ask you to respond to me individually -
though of course you can do that also.
May I just say that I realize that you are busy and that this request
may seem as somewhat tangential to your project and your work but I
would like to convince you that it is in your own best interest to
respond. And if you don't respond I would like to hear your reason
also if that would not be too much trouble (no time / could not be
bothered / do not see the value in it / and so on). The questionnaire
is not that long (I personally hate form-filling myself) and none of
the answers are obligatory, all information is private and
confidential, you will remain anonymous and I will not publish
anything without your consent. Honest.
I believe that providing responses for my research will help this
project in multiple ways. It will help you provide historical and
social documentation for your project. It will definitely increase
awareness of the project and the goals and ambitions of the project
members. As one of my research goals is understanding how open source
mathematical tools could achieve parity (at least in terms of
mindshare and use) with proprietary tools the more responses I get the
better a position I will be in to make a stab at this.
Lastly, I am based in Finland - I would love to head over to Seattle
to meet you at your Bug Days or Women in Sage events but that will not
be possible. I should in all probability make it to the Singular Days
event in Germany at the end of September though so look forward to
seeing some of you there in person.
Kind regards and best wishes,
Anthony Durity
William Stein
<anthony...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello again!
>
> First of all, thank you so much to everyone who has already replied.
>
> Recently I put out a request for volunteers to answer a few questions.
> I got some responses but considering there are 1331 (11^3 , an
Your attached odt file begins "All information you provide will remain
private and anonymous.". The first question you ask after that is for
my first and last name.
In what sense is this anonymous? So I'm not convinced you have
thought through how to do human subjects research... (I don't claim I
have either, but I had to deal with a review board for human subjects
research at Univ of Washington a few weeks ago for a grant I'm on, and
it was clear that one of my co-PI's *had* thought through doing human
subjects research, and I learned something from what they did.)
It also seems weird ending with "I certify that the information given
in this application is complete and accurate." and requiring a
signature.
Incidentally, Harald Schilly has done some surveys in the past with
very similar questions to the Sage community. He used Google Docs
forms [1], which are much more pleasant to fill out than Word
documents, and the information in them automatically goes into a
spreadsheet. You might consider using them or something similar.
[1] https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87809
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--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
Anthony Durity
What I meant by private and anonymous is that even though the
information you provide me could very well be published I won't
publish your name and it should not be easy to link individual
responses back to individual respondents.
I did not know about Harald Schilly, thanks for letting me know.
Thanks for the suggestion about Google Docs forms, it seems a bit late
to redo it all now.
I hope you'll take the time to fill out the questionnaire ... I
equivocated about inserting the "complete and accurate" thing and in
hindsight it was probably dumb, I just wanted to discourage any
"ballot stuffing". I've looked at other research, we've gone through
this in class, I'm more a tech person / philosopher type than
sociologist so I hope you'll appreciate that I'm doing the best I can.
Kind regards,
Anthony
2011/7/11 William Stein <wst...@gmail.com>:
Harald Schilly
Jason Grout
I would much more readily fill out the survey if:
1. it was a google docs survey, for convenience
2. Question 1 was cut down to only asking "Profession:", for anonymity.
Thanks,
Jason
Anthony Durity
Some of it is not necessary I am sure, but nothing is obligatory so ...
I wanted the questions to be open ended so people would just write and write.
You may take rip off anything at all, I should have mentioned that,
the questionnaire is pretty much public domain.
Educational background and use of other mathematical software packages
is of course very interesting stuff, I hope I would get feedback like
that.
Thanks for your offer of help, I greatly appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Anthony Durity
2011/7/11 Harald Schilly <harald....@gmail.com>:
Anthony Durity
I have amended the document by removing the unnecessary silly final
requests. All I would ask you to do is date it for me.
To be _clear_, all fields are optional. Provide as much or as little
info as you desire - from the doc, "All information you provide will
remain private and anonymous. Nothing will be published without your
prior consent. None of the information is obligatory, answer as many
or as few questions as you wish – though of course I would greatly
appreciate as much detail as possible."
I will provide a Google Docs form/survey in the next couple of days
for all those who prefer that entry method and then I shall leave you
all in peace. Thank you all _so_ _so_ much for your cooperation and I
look forward greatly to your responses.
Best wishes and kind regards,
Anthony Durity
2011/7/11 Jason Grout <jason...@creativetrax.com>:
> Thanks,
Simon King
On 11 Jul., 16:55, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote:
> I would much more readily fill out the survey if:
>
> 1. it was a google docs survey, for convenience
>
> 2. Question 1 was cut down to only asking "Profession:", for anonymity.
Even the request to send the filled form to you by e-mail is breaking
anonymity. That is a no-go for me.
At my university, the psychology and sociology departments often do
surveys, in which I occasionally participate. They do ask you for your
signature (they need confirmation that they are allowed to use the
data), but that always is ON A SEPARATE SHEET and kept separate from
the forms that one fills.
Sometimes they want to correlate data from different surveys. But even
in that case, they would not ask you for your name or e-mail, but they
would ask you to create a code, formed by, say, the day (not the
month) of your birthday and by the first two letters of your mother's
and your father's first name. It is like a hash code: It allows to
determine some correlation, but it should not provide enough
information to identify an individual.
Cheers,
Simon
Anthony Durity
Like I said, I will be shortly putting the survey online for the sake
of convenience and so that a person can submit info completely
anonymously if that is the person's desire. It will contain the same
information as the revised doc I just sent around, _all_ fields are
optional as I said so please ignore anything you do not wish to
answer!
I will take it that any response is a confirmation of
participation/use so the signature/confirmation thing was dumb, like I
said.
I will not be correlating information across surveys so hash codes
(while a neat idea) will not be necessary.
Thank you all for your interesting feedback, I look forward to reading
your responses :)
Anthony Durity
2011/7/11 Simon King <simon...@uni-jena.de>:
Volker Braun
rjf
This "survey" is hardly a scientific instrument whose results can be
tabulated, and whose subjects could possibly be injured by
participation.
It is a fishing expedition in which the author is trying to find out
some range of
opinions, not pry secrets out of unwilling random people.
If someone asks me "what do you think of Sage" I do not expect
that the author has run the question past his institution's board for
review of experiments
with human subjects.
I also do not require anonymity, but if I did I certainly wouldn't
respond by email :)
Volker Braun
Anthony Durity
I will talk to my thesis supervisor about this IRB thing. We (as a
class) have drawn up research plans and gone through them in detail,
we have taken quite a number of Research Ethics classes, we had a
Methodological Issues in Internet Research course module and this
piece of info never came up. Thank you for the heads up though and I
promise that I'll look into it. I kind of agree with rjf, I'm not
prying secrets, but at the same time this is not a totally
unscientific fishing expedition (as you so sweetly put it) as I have
put quite a lot of work into getting this far already. As I intimated
in my first mail, I have worked in IT as a software tester and
developer for many years and I've admin'd Linux servers and know the
FOSS landscape inside and out - I also have a degree in philosophy and
mathematics so whatever you throw at me I'm going to understand it.
I'm not going to mutate your feedback into a bunch of sociological
rubbish. You people join the likes of the Fedora Project in being
placed under the anthropological microscope :)
Thanks in advance again everyone,
Anthony
2011/7/11 Volker Braun <vbrau...@gmail.com>:
rjf
I did not say "totally unscientific fishing expedition", just
"fishing expedition".
I have no objection to fishing expeditions per se. Sorry if I gave
you that impression.
As for IRB stuff. Maybe that's more of a are-you-in-the-USA issue? I
would like to think that people in other countries are protected AT
LEAST as much as in the USA, but maybe other countries are more
realistic.
I stopped asking for NSF funding for user-interface kinds of research
when I was told by a review panel that I would have to hire some
expert in human factors and go through some testing-on-humans process
etc.
My thought was that I (with some students) would implement some ideas
that would be so evidently neat that other people would adopt them and
incorporate the ideas in whatever they were doing and thereby
demonstrate their utility.
That way I could do the research I wanted to do, and other people who
specialized in human factors or whatever, could test them as they saw
fit. Unfortunately, the reviewers were those "other people who
specialized in human factors" and therefore they viewed their own
contributions as front-and-center necessary in my proposal.
This is a common issue. For example, if a computer algebra system
proposal mentions in some sidelight that some numerical analysis
library programs would be used, then the proposal is reviewed by
numerical analysis specialists who take a dim view of spending NSF (or
whatever agency) money on someone who is not offering to conduct
fundamental ground-breaking research in numerical computation.
This is perhaps off-topic for Sage-Devel, but maybe speaks to some
issues of interest to Anthony Durity. After all, if one wishes to
develop scientific software in some framework where funding is needed,
then one needs to figure out how to get funding. Government?
Industry? Starting a company? And how to continue to get funding.
Licenses? Donations? Selling ads?
If the FOSS model can be shown to work for Sage in both startup and
continuation modes, that's something interesting. I do recall that a
few months ago William Stein said he was moving on to something else,
more researchy, but I guess he is still hanging around.
I don't know if Sage will ever reach what I would call steady-state,
and so it is not clear what the steady-state model would have to be,
financially etc.
Based on past experiences in programs that may or may not be
comparable in your view to Sage, a relatively successful academic
program (even for 5 or 10 years) can have some major perturbations.
(Macsyma, Maple, Matlab, Mupad, Scratchpad/Axiom/Fricas,
Theorist, ...). One can argue that the internet changes so much that
we cannot draw conclusions from these past events. Sure.
But can we draw the conclusion that the internet will make FOSS for
scientific computing a success? For fully-written more-or-less closed-
end programs (maybe like the Gnu scientific subroutines?) it is
possible to declare success. Maybe. For open-ended programs that
attempt to grow to include almost anything that is "mathy" enough, and
runs on any computer ... that seems harder.
The apparent situation that Sage still doesn't run on Windows,
natively, is to me a caution. Does everyone with windows (or other non-
unix OS) have to run Sage in a virtual machine environment with some
unix emulator?
grump, grump :)
RJF
RJF