INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE IN FLOSSCom TOOLS SURVEY

Dear Madam / Sir

The FLOSSCom project is aimed at identifying the factors that contribute to successful knowledge construction in informal learning communities, such as the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities and to analyze the effectiveness of FLOSS-like learning communities in a formal educational setting.

Consequently the project is also investigating how members learn within the open source software communities. One of the related questions, for which we developed a survey, is to learn about the type of tools that are actually used by the members, what they are used for and how they support them within the different activities.

For this reason we would like to invite you to take part in this survey and to share your experience and knowledge with us!

In the case you would like to learn more about the FLOSSCom project, or to become a member of its community – your are also encouraged to visit us at our website!

FLOSSCom is a scientific project that is financed by the European Commission and carried out by the Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação and several partners; including the British Open University.

It serves exclusively the public research interest. The information you provide will be kept strictly confidential, and nobody outside the FLOSSCom research team will have access to personalised data. Moreover, all results we publish will ensure that the identification of persons who have replied to the questionnaires will be impossible.

If you are younger than 18 years, we would like to draw attention to the fact that surveying of underage persons is a sensitive ethical issue. However, we acknowledge that many members of the FLOSS community are quite young. If you are underage, we would like to recommend that you carefully consider the purpose of our survey, as stated in this letter, before filling it out.

If you have further questions or comments on this topic do not hesitate to contact us.

With kind regards

Andreas Meiszner

(contact: A.Meiszner@open.ac.uk)

Take the survey!