{"id":1808,"date":"2013-08-12T13:50:07","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T20:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2013-08-12T13:50:07","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T20:50:07","slug":"results-of-survey-on-meaning-of-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/2013\/08\/12\/results-of-survey-on-meaning-of-open\/","title":{"rendered":"Results of survey on meaning of “open”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Why Open Brainstorm,<\/a> by Laila Le Guen,<\/a> licensed CC-BY.<\/a> This image was done by a participant in the Why Open? course, a brainstorm mixing her views on why openness is important with those gathered from the survey discussed in this post. Laila<\/a> shared it on Twitter on the #whyopen <\/a> tag.<\/p><\/div>\n

As part of a Why Open? course<\/a><\/span> I’m helping to facilitate, we sent out a survey to gather different people’s views of what they think “openness” means–we were hoping to get answers from people in various professions. As part of the course, we asked participants to respond to some of these definitions in the discussion area for week 1, at the bottom of this page<\/a>.<\/span> But my comments are going to be so long that I think they’ll be easier to read in a blog post! So I’ll post a link to this blog post in that discussion area.<\/span><\/p>\n

We got 30 responses to the survey, which is quite a good number from something sent out for a couple of weeks on email lists, Twitter, and other social sites! You can see all the results of the survey in a couple of formats.<\/span> Here<\/a><\/span> you can see the answers to each question listed out under the question, and<\/span> here is the spreadsheet<\/a> <\/span>where you can link question answers to the person who gave them (if they gave a name) and their profession.<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s another, similar survey focused on teachers\/faculty and what openness means in the context of research and teaching,<\/span> here<\/a><\/span>, done for another purpose. <\/span>It also provides some interesting results, but I’ll focus here just on the survey we did.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

I thought about trying to see if there were patterns amongst people with similar professions, but I’m not sure we have enough data to do that, really. There are quite a few different types of professions represented, so there aren’t that many people in each type of profession (except education and educational technology–there are a significant number of people in those fields).\u00a0 So I decided to keep track of some common answers, and then comment on some of the uncommon ones that I hadn’t considered before or found interesting for some other reason. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Question on what people think “open” means, whether in general or in a particular field\/practice\/activity<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Our first question was: What does “open” mean to you?<\/span><\/p>\n

Common answers to the meaning of “open”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I did not do a super careful job of coding the answers, so others may come up with different numbers if they try to put answers together into similar categories! It was kind of a rough coding\/categorization.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I’m not attaching any great significance to these results–e.g., not suggesting that since these showed up quite often in our survey then it must be the case that most people who try to state their view of the meaning of “open” are going to have these in there. This was not at all a random sample. I include these just to give an idea of what one might often hear when people are talking about openness.<\/span><\/p>\n