Community Survey

Please Take the Survey!

By Barbara Heath (East Main Educational Consulting) and Susan Brown (iPlant Collaborative)

In an effort to understand the development of the iPlant Collaborative and the community that forms around it, a social science team and an external evaluation team have been included during the early stages of program planning. The social science research team is led by Dr. Susan Brown (suebrown@eller.arizona.edu) of the University of Arizona and the evaluation team is led by Dr. Barbara Heath (bheath@emeconline.com) of East Main Educational Consulting.

As part of the evaluation and research plans, community members are invited to participate in various data collection activities depending upon the iPlant event. At this time, we are reaching out to the community in the form of a short survey that will require no more than 10 minutes of your time. Your responses will be used in many different ways, including:

• Studying adoption, use, and impacts of technology-related changes in society;
• Furthering our understanding of how and why people choose to participate in cyberinfrastructure initiatives, as well as the ways in which collaborative relationships are strengthened and expanded;
• Applying what is learned to the iPlant project to help make the experience a positive one;
• Independently measuring the success of the iPlant Collaborative in relation to the project's defined goals and outcomes;
• Generating formative reports so that the project team and Board of Directors can make data-based project decisions;
• Creating a feedback loop that includes the community of users.

In order to ensure that each survey is concise and takes up a minimal amount of your time, we have combined the surveys from the social science research and the evaluation teams. This means that each survey has more value, as it will be used in several different capacities. We hope that you will assist us by responding to the survey. The feedback to iPlant, as well as social science theory and practice, are stronger when we have more participants responding. We thank you in advance for your cooperation! Please visit:

http://survey.emeconline.com/survey3/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=86KI572