Alfred P. Sloan Foundation reposted this
David R. Anderson Director, UW-Madison Data Science Institute and Professor of Physics, Statistics, and Computer Science
I'm very happy to share the survey that we conducted on #OpenSource at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for funding our OSPO. We've made the survey itself and a tool to analyze & visualize the results open source too. The survey confirmed my expectation that our academic community sees the value in having a vibrant open source culture, but we have a lot of room for improvement. Our OSPO aims to address that by fostering and growing the open source community and culture on campus.
The Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at DSI recently surveyed the campus community to gauge interest in open-source software, hardware and teaching materials and collect feedback on improving the open-source environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Check out the results: https://lnkd.in/gwtuXy3K Survey highlights: Most survey respondents were familiar with open-source software. Python, Linux and Julia topped the list of tools important to their work. More than half said they use open-source tools more often than UW-provided, licensed software (excluding Adobe and Microsoft). A majority of respondents said that open-source tools are critical to their research, teaching and learning. Most agreed that open source is a valuable research output that translates into innovation. They identified knowledge sharing and lower costs as its biggest benefits. 60% of respondents said that having a vibrant open source culture is “very valuable”. However, only 31% agreed that there is a vibrant open source culture at UW-Madison. 73% expressed interest in open source training organized by OSPO. OSPO has made this survey, and the tool to analyze the results, open source. Our hope is that other universities will use it and share their results, leading to a broader understanding of the open-source ecosystem in academia. Thanks to a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, OSPO is positioned to support and grow a vibrant open-source ecosystem at UW–Madison. Learn more at https://ospo.wisc.edu/
323 respondents finished the survey—what's your assessment of this response rate? It is the bane of survey organizers that most people are just too overloaded to reply (I know I get tons of survey requests, and ignore them all). I would like our OSPO to conduct a survey like this (thank you for making it open source!), but feel pessimistic about response rates. Thoughts?
David R. Anderson Director, UW-Madison Data Science Institute and Professor of Physics, Statistics, and Computer Science
3moTagging some people that might be interested: Brad Burke, Carly Strasser, Josh Greenberg, Fernando Pérez, Sayeed Choudhury, Carlos Maltzahn, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Wellcome Trust, Schmidt Futures, Chris Holdgraf, Chris Mentzel, Vicky Rampin, TODO (OSPO) Group, OSPO++, CHAOSS, CURIOSS, Academic Data Science Alliance, NumFOCUS, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), Open Source Science Initiative (OSSci), SciPy Conference, Sebastian Raschka, PhD, Erwin Gianchandani, Courtney Haun, PhD, MPH, Lorena A. Barba