Open Hardware Community Survey

Announcing the Open Source Hardware Community Survey! A team of us* created this survey because we wanted to get a snapshot of the people who make, use and share open-source hardware. Catarina writes:

In an effort to better understand who we are as a community, as well as why and how we use/make open-source hardware, a few of us* created a survey. Please participate so that we can promote open-source hardware and serve you to the best of our abilities!

The survey will be up until April 15, and the aggregate results will be made publicly available in the form of a report consisting of graphics, percentages, and anonymized quotes. By publishing your (anonymous) responses, we hope to provide the public with insights into the practices and experiences of the people involved in open-source hardware.

If you make, use, or benefit from open-source hardware (if you are an Adafruit customer this very likely applies to you 🙂 ), please consider taking this survey and helping us develop a picture of the OSHW community!

*- I am very graciously given credit for helping create this survey. While I certainly did assist in drafting up some of the questions and developing the idea, I have to give Catarina a super extra-special shoutout for an AMAZING job wrangling the whole thing together and getting into the form it is now. This would not have happened without her. Great job, Catarina!

UPDATE: It seems a small percentage of folks are having issues with the survey ‘resetting’ halfway through. I experienced this myself. Unfortunately, it does not repeat with any regularity, so we are stumped w/r/t the cause. If you have this issue, please let us know your browser/OS combo (here in the comments) when reporting, so that we can help isolate the problem. Thanks!


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6 Comments

  1. In the middle of the survey, the next button gets me back to the first page.
    I won’t fill it a third time, but in case you didn’t receive anything : http://smoothieware.org/smoothieboard

  2. And… done! Best of luck to John, Catarina, and David! May your responses be many and your data significant.

  3. I had the same problem, arthur.

    But, all my answers were still populated, and I was able just to click the next button a few times to get back to where I was. The 2nd time through, the 3rd page ‘took’, and I progressed onto the 4th page.

  4. I have the same problem, typed all the answers out on the 4th page a few times now.. maybe I’ll try a little bit later. 🙁

    Would love to finish this!

  5. @Harry: thanks!

    @arthus, azrobbo and Jeremy: I’m sorry that you folks had problems filling it out. In fact, I had the same problem the first time I attempted to fill it out. It seems to be a SurveyMonkey issue, and it’s not repeatable with any sort of regularity, so it’s very difficult to troubleshoot. We’ve had many people complete the survey without issue, so it only appears to affect a small percentage of respondents. Any chance you could say what browser/OS you’re using — it might help us isolate the problem.

    As Jeremy suggested, the best solution seems to be simply trying again at a later time. I realize this isn’t optimal, but it worked in my case.

    Thanks all for the feedback– it is appreciated! 🙂

  6. Using Chrome on Win7-64.

    I was sent back to the first page twice. Only had to refill the page I was trying to submit; all others were still populated.

    (Sidenote: The Lazarus extension (Chrome, Firefox) autosaves form content for situations like this. It’s saved me more time than I care to think about.)

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