I’ve been a big fan of Dr. Heidi Ellis since we met at the first annual Humanitarian FOSS Symposium. We happened to cross paths last week at the UMass Amherst ICT Summit and she noted that one of her students was doing a survey on the use of documentation in open source projects, specifically what developers need and how they use documentation. Since I know quite a few folks who’d be interested in that sort of thing, I “faceblogtweeted” as they say and went my merry way.

Apparently, the response rate from the open source community to the survey has been fantastic. Heidi gave us all a shout out on her blog, which is well worth a read if you’re interested in the intersection of open source and higher education. If you’re interested in helping academics learn more about how FOSS developers use documentation, please take a moment to complete the survey. Dr. Ellis and her students will make sure to post the results on the Teaching Open Source mailing list in the coming months, and I’ll post a link to that thread in the comments once it’s been posted.