Project collaborators
Allison Kittinger and Bethany Philbrick, Open Source Program Office
Kyle Cranmer and Isaac Baumann, Data Science Institute
Project start and end dates
January-June 2024
Project summary
The survey achieved our goal of getting a better picture of campus open source needs and activities, and the DSI helped organize the results into a clear and presentable narrative. There is already interest in utilizing the survey instrument and visualizations from other university OSPOs nationwide. —Allison Kittinger
In Spring 2024, the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) surveyed the UW–Madison campus community to gauge the use of open-source tools among community members, identify open-source projects under development, and collect feedback on improving the open-source environment on campus. OSPO worked with the Data Science Institute to create an accompanying website that summarizes the survey results and allows users to explore how people use open-source tools at UW-Madison.
OSPO is open sourcing the survey itself, an anonymized version of the responses, and the Quarto-based analysis of the survey results. Our goal is to streamline such surveys at other universities and encourage a uniform set of questions and responses that can more easily be aggregated to understand the broader open source ecosystem in academia. If you’re interested in reproducing this survey and website for your institution, please see the project website.
The survey was administered with Qualtrics. Both the .qsf file for the survey and an example CSV of anonymized survey response data are available in the project’s GitHub repo. Analysis of survey results was performed within R code chunks within the Quarto files for the appropriate pages.