DIYbio community focused survey questions

[Jarkko Moilanen]

Hi,

I'm planning to conduct another survey under the Statistical Studies
of Peer Production. This survey will be conducted this fall (2012)
under Statistical Studies of Peer Production (project supported by P2P
Foundation).

Results will be used in my [2] PhD about DIY communities and is part
of larger research project which consists of annual surveys among
hackerspaces, makerspaces, fablabs, 3D printing community, diybio,
etc. Previous surveys have not been directed to one rising community
(DIYbio) directly. Aim is to 'fix' that hole and get more accurate
information about DIYbio community. Intention is to make this survey
also annual and repeat it every year to get longitudinal data as well.

With the results from this survey, community could get ideas about how
to make DIYbio more successful and easier to approach. For the record,
results from previous surveys have been published in several blogs and
web journals. Some results have already ended up in academic
publications. In other words, participating in this kind of work is
not in vain :)

And as always, all anonymized survey raw data will be open sourced,
eg. put available in Statistical Studies of Peer Production site.

To give community a chance to participate in the survey also in
defining the questions, I have started drafting the questions in
piratepad: http://piratepad.net/diybio-survey. I would appreciate a
lot if you would read the questions and give feedback to me (on this
list, in the pad or directly to me). Your feedback can be a question
that should be added, reformation of existing question or something
else. All input is important to me and to make this survey a success.

Plan is to put questions in LimeSurvey format as soon as possible, but
latest around 15th Sept. To reach that goal, all comments and
suggestions for the questions should be given before that date.
Another aim (timewise) is to launch survey 1st Oct 2012. Feel free to
spread the message to all whom it might concern.


Cheers,
Jarkko
--
---------------
Jarkko Moilanen, M.Soc.Sc
PhD Candidate
School of Information Sciences
http://www.uta.fi/sis/en/index.html
Blog: http://blog.ossoil.com
Statistical Studies of Peer Production: http://surveys.peerproduction.net/

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Looks good. You may want to add some questions on occupation and level of background in biology. How many DIYbio'ers are highschoolers vs professional scientists? Hardware engineers vs molecular biologists?

[Mega]

Hope you got my answer-mail.

Don't find it in the output-emails (sent emails) file

[Jarkko Moilanen]

Hi

2012/8/26 Patrik D'haeseleer <pat...@gmail.com>:

> Looks good. You may want to add some questions on occupation and level of
> background in biology. How many DIYbio'ers are highschoolers vs professional
> scientists? Hardware engineers vs molecular biologists?
>

Those are good questions!
Yes, I will add something that will indicate level of respondent
'professionality' in biology. The last "Hardware engineers vs
molecular biologists?" is a bit tricky. My option to capture
information related to that would be catching categories of which
respondents projects are related to. I would prefer to give a list of
categories such as those from which respondent can select those that
apply. Problem is that I have no glue about the categories (except
those mentioned above) :) Of course I can put there something and
then 'other, please specify'. But that would mean more work for the
respondent and possibly cause loss of answers. In brief my questions
is "What are the categories of common diybio projects?"

/Jarkko

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Organizer (TMN, Tampere Meego Network)
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Email: jarkko dot moilanen at meegonetwork dot fi

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[Bryan Bishop]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Jarkko Moilanen <jarkko....@meegonetwork.fi> wrote:

With the results from this survey, community could get ideas about how
to make DIYbio more successful and easier to approach. For the record,

Maybe you can use the previous survey thing:

http://diybio.org/survey/

http://diybiology.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/2010-05-04_diybio_survey_raw_public11.xlswp-content/uploads/2010/04/2010-05-04_diybio_survey_raw_public.csv

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/diybio/faq/better-questions

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

[Bryan Bishop]

On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Jarkko Moilanen <jarkko....@meegonetwork.fi> wrote:

from them. Especially the last 'Better questions' contains good stuff.

Those questions were extracted from the mailing list archives, based on what people frequently ask. This was mostly a manual process so there's lots of problems with it.. someone with more natural language processing chops might want to take a stab at it sometime.

[osazuwa]

Another way of phrasing this question is, can you distinguish between those who have a background in biology/formal wet lab experience, and those who do not have biology backgrounds but have other technical expertise such as programming, engineering, experience with Maker-style projects.  For the latter group, why were they drawn to DIYbio?

In DIYBio you have people who are biology experts, and are motivated by becoming more independent of institutions .  On the other hand you have people who are good at making web apps or doing arduino projects, and are interested in applying their skills to biology-themed projects.

[Jarkko Moilanen]

2012/8/27 osazuwa <rober...@gmail.com>:

> Another way of phrasing this question is, can you distinguish between those
> who have a background in biology/formal wet lab experience, and those who do
> not have biology backgrounds but have other technical expertise such as
> programming, engineering, experience with Maker-style projects. For the
> latter group, why were they drawn to DIYbio?
>

Why and when is my interest too. One of my aims (of this survey) is to
be able to put DIYbio on the fabbing map, which has been defined by
Troxler. http://surveys.peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/troxler-modified-map-target-groups-3.png

> In DIYBio you have people who are biology experts, and are motivated by
> becoming more independent of institutions . On the other hand you have
> people who are good at making web apps or doing arduino projects, and are
> interested in applying their skills to biology-themed projects.
>

Indeed, you are right.

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[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Why and when is my interest too. One of my aims (of this survey) is to
be able to put DIYbio on the fabbing map, which has been defined by
Troxler. http://surveys.peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/troxler-modified-map-target-groups-3.png

I never found that diagram to be particularly useful, actually. There are aspects of DIYbio in all four quadrants of that map. I usually tend to think of DIYbio as being in the top right quadrant, but then you also have places like BioCurious and Genspace that are providing infrastructure (lab space and equipment for use by membership), and there's people building Open Source DIYbio hardware, etc. You can pretty much take each of those ellipses and add "as applied to DIYbio" to them.

The other thing you should clarify for yourself is whether you want to survey *people* involved in DIYbio, or
DIYbio *projects*. That is, "Who?" versus "What?".

 I'm involved in some collaborative projects with a bunch of people with very different backgrounds - many of whom hadn't done any hands-on biology since highschool. So if you only ask about what the project is, you'll be missing a lot of very interesting information! I think the fact that there are so many people coming from outside biology and bringing novel ideas to the field is one of the most exciting aspects of DIYbio.

Patrik

[Jarkko Moilanen]

2012/8/27 Patrik D'haeseleer <pat...@gmail.com>:

>
>> Why and when is my interest too. One of my aims (of this survey) is to
>> be able to put DIYbio on the fabbing map, which has been defined by
>> Troxler.
>> http://surveys.peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/troxler-modified-map-target-groups-3.png
>
>
> I never found that diagram to be particularly useful, actually. There are
> aspects of DIYbio in all four quadrants of that map. I usually tend to think
> of DIYbio as being in the top right quadrant, but then you also have places
> like BioCurious and Genspace that are providing infrastructure (lab space
> and equipment for use by membership), and there's people building Open
> Source DIYbio hardware, etc. You can pretty much take each of those ellipses
> and add "as applied to DIYbio" to them.
>
> The other thing you should clarify for yourself is whether you want to
> survey *people* involved in DIYbio, or
> DIYbio *projects*. That is, "Who?" versus "What?".
>
> I'm involved in some collaborative projects with a bunch of people with
> very different backgrounds - many of whom hadn't done any hands-on biology
> since highschool. So if you only ask about what the project is, you'll be
> missing a lot of very interesting information! I think the fact that there
> are so many people coming from outside biology and bringing novel ideas to
> the field is one of the most exciting aspects of DIYbio.
>

I do realize that, but you can't catch all in one survey. Otherwise it
blows up in the amount of questions. " you'll be missing a lot of
very interesting information!" That depends what ever is sought after.
Thanks for the thoughts and ideas. Some of them made me think.

/Jarkko

> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/tp-PXfPtPIoJ.