[OSM-talk] 【research on OSM】Surveying

[stevea]

Bowen, it may be that a shortest path for you is to make an online version of your survey, then post, like here and other places where your target audience is reading and might be interested to go take the survey.  Try to be very specific in the kinds of questions you are going to answer; there is nothing worse than good-natured volunteers willing to answer a survey to find the questions misleading or not what they expected.

A couple of things.  First, you might want to look into using OSM's OAuth verification to screen that the users are actual OSM Contributors.  To be correct and polite about this, I recommend telling potential survey-answerers that asking them to type their OSM credentials (OSM username and password) is only used to verify they are bonafide OSM Contributors, that you don't get to see these, only whether they "get past the gate" or not, and that the answers they give are anonymous and not tied to their online OSM identity.  Second, you should think very carefully about the places where you solicit people to actually go and take the survey, as these "pools" of potential answerers will certainly skew the answers in particular directions, and therefore your ultimate dataset as results.  It can be hard to know which "channels" are more technical, more social, more "casual mapping oriented..." et cetera, as that comes with long experience of moving between the various communication channels that OSM Contributors frequent (read, post to, get notified about when there are new posts...).

Good luck with your survey and research.