In 2008, Michael Barton conducted the Bioinformatics Career Survey whose results are still available on openwetware: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Biogang:Projects/Bioinformatics_Career_Survey_2008
The results of this survey have been used in biostar:
and elsewhere (http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/12/114)...
We would like to repeat this survey and, with the rise of Twitter & co, we could receive more answers than previously. Here, I'm asking the BioStar community what are the questions that you would like to see in this survey, what do you want to know about the community.
Here are a few suggestions based on the previous survey. Feel free to suggest some new questions or to complete the following ones:
- profile: name, latitude & longitude, (this should be optional, I remember some people didn't want to be identified)
- academics/industry
- Happiness
- subject (shall we use a controlled vocabulary=SW)
- Research Areas (SW?)
- programming languages (SW?)
- favorite tools
- social web (biostar, twitter...)
- journals
- do you contribute to wikipedia?
- what the best way to build this survey? etc...
PS: hashtag: #bioinfsurvey
PS: community wiki.
Edit: Michael started a repository on github: https://github.com/michaelbarton/bioinformatics-career-survey
Edit2: the survey has started, take it here: http://bioinfsurvey.org/
Thanks for writing this up Pierre! I didn't even know the data had been used in those biostar questions. Now I see further why a repeat would be useful.
Also discussed on BioStar here: Economics Of A Career In Bioinformatics
Thank you for the useful suggestions so far. Up votes all around.
Do you have a deadline for preparing the questions? When would you like to start the survey?
@Giovanni: No, I don't even know how we shall build this survey (surveymonkey?). I would like to write a dynamic HTML form but in that case, I would need a server to receive the POST queries and store the data.
@Pierre. Maybe a google doc form? All answers are then gathered in an (google doc) spreadsheet.