LimeInterview #2: Meet our partner "ACSPRI"

English

Details: Category: Blog; 29 August 2019

4 years ago

Q: When and for what project did you use LimeSurvey the first time? A: When working at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia in 2006, I started using LimeSurvey (which was then called PHPSurveyor) for experimenting with web based surveys. In 2005 at Deakin, with colleagues Ken Reed and Bridget O’Brien, we had developed a basic description of a questionnaire in XML, called “queXML”. At the time, we used manually edited XML in queXML form to describe the questionnaire once, then used XML Stylesheets to convert the XML in to specific code for particular survey packages. At the time we were using a system developed at UC Berkeley called CASES for telephone interviewing, and also developed an XML Stylesheet along with the Apache FOP processor to produce PDF documents of the survey. In early 2006 I discovered PHPSurveyor, which, while in its infancy was a very flexible tool for web based surveys. We developed a new stylesheet which produced SQL statements from queXML and manually inserted the questionnaire structure in the format that PHPSurveyor understood, and then in 2006, developed export code for queXML for PHPSurveyor, so it could be used as an authoring tool for questionnaires and export queXML. Carsten, who I believe had only recently taken the reins at the newly renamed LimeSurvey project, accepted our patch and queXML has been included in LimeSurvey since the very early version of LimeSurvey 1.6.Q: When did you start your business?A: In 2009 I moved from Deakin University to ACSPRI, the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated, and along with colleague and director at the time of ACSPRI, Ken Reed, set up ACSPRI as a small, academically focused survey research operation, independent of one particular university. ACSPRI has a long history in the social and political sciences in Australia, being established in 1976 to aid researchers to access survey data stored in the data archives of the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) in Michigan, USA. Since 2009, ACSPRI has provided survey services mainly to Australian universities and government research bodies, with a focus on using open source technologies such as LimeSurvey.Q: Tell us about your company and your team.A: ACSPRI is a small, not-for-profit organisation based in Melbourne, Australia. Our members are institutions, not individuals. Most Australian universities are members of ACSPRI, along with many government based research organisations. Our services are geared towards our members. We are a small team, focused on providing timely and friendly service.Q: Which services do you offer as LimeSurvey authorized partner?A: With many years of experience with LimeSurvey under our belt, including developing tools that wrap around LimeSurvey (such as our telephone interviewing system, queXS; our paper form mark recognition and processing system, queXF; and our tool for describing questionnaires and producing paper forms, queXML) – we consider ourselves a “full service” LimeSurvey partner, in that we provide the “usual” LimeSurvey services such as installation, hosting, survey programming, customisation, and theme development, but also provide support and development of tools related to broader survey data collection, not limited to just LimeSurvey. We believe LimeSurvey is a fantastic tool that forms an integral part of survey data collection operations more broadly.Q: Do you have a special tip for advanced LimeSurvey users?A: Use the “survey logic file” often, especially before activating a survey. Some logic issues may not appear as errors in the logic file, but may become clear to you if you notice the expression manager syntax not being highlighted.Q: Tell us about your most interesting or challenging LimeSurvey project.A: One project which I believe has shown the power of LimeSurvey as a data collection tool, but also stressed its capacity to the limit is a project we are running for collecting data for a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). DCE’s (also known as choice modelling) techniques, involve constructing a set of items (called a “choice set”) and then asking respondents a selected subset of these items. For this to work, the questionnaire in LimeSurvey needs to be set up in a way that has all possible choice sets pre-loaded, and also know how to choose the particular subset to display to the respondent. For this we have made extensive use of array style questions, along with the fantastically powerful Expression Manager system.Q: What do you consider the most important IT development at the moment?A: Containers. Software such as Docker has changed the way services can be delivered to greatly increase server utilisation and reduce administration – which both lead cost savings and efficiency improvements. We have been maintaining a Docker container for LimeSurvey which allows for the quick installation or testing of LimeSurvey without the need to provision and configure server. This container now has over 100,000 pulls on Docker Hub.If you would like to find out more about Adam & his team, please check their website. You can also address them questions on the forum.In case you would like to find out more about our network of partners, please visit the following website.

We continue our series of #LimeInterviews with Adam Zammit from ACSPRI (Australian Consortium for Social & Political Research Inc.), a not-for-profit organisation based in Australia. Their services are generally geared towards the members of the association, but he and his team also provide "usual" LimeSurvey services such as installation, hosting, survey programming, customization, and theme development.

Q: When and for what project did you use LimeSurvey the first time?

A: When working at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia in 2006, I started using LimeSurvey (which was then called PHPSurveyor) for experimenting with web based surveys.

In 2005 at Deakin, with colleagues Ken Reed and Bridget O’Brien, we had developed a basic description of a questionnaire in XML, called “queXML”. At the time, we used manually edited XML in queXML form to describe the questionnaire once, then used XML Stylesheets to convert the XML in to specific code for particular survey packages. At the time we were using a system developed at UC Berkeley called CASES for telephone interviewing, and also developed an XML Stylesheet along with the Apache FOP processor to produce PDF documents of the survey. In early 2006 I discovered PHPSurveyor, which, while in its infancy was a very flexible tool for web based surveys.

We developed a new stylesheet which produced SQL statements from queXML and manually inserted the questionnaire structure in the format that PHPSurveyor understood, and then in 2006, developed export code for queXML for PHPSurveyor, so it could be used as an authoring tool for questionnaires and export queXML. Carsten, who I believe had only recently taken the reins at the newly renamed LimeSurvey project, accepted our patch and queXML has been included in LimeSurvey since the very early version of LimeSurvey 1.6.

Q: When did you start your business?

A: In 2009 I moved from Deakin University to ACSPRI, the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated, and along with colleague and director at the time of ACSPRI, Ken Reed, set up ACSPRI as a small, academically focused survey research operation, independent of one particular university. ACSPRI has a long history in the social and political sciences in Australia, being established in 1976 to aid researchers to access survey data stored in the data archives of the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) in Michigan, USA.

Since 2009, ACSPRI has provided survey services mainly to Australian universities and government research bodies, with a focus on using open source technologies such as LimeSurvey.

Q: Tell us about your company and your team.

A: ACSPRI is a small, not-for-profit organisation based in Melbourne, Australia. Our members are institutions, not individuals. Most Australian universities are members of ACSPRI, along with many government based research organisations. Our services are geared towards our members. We are a small team, focused on providing timely and friendly service.

Q: Which services do you offer as LimeSurvey authorized partner?

A: With many years of experience with LimeSurvey under our belt, including developing tools that wrap around LimeSurvey (such as our telephone interviewing system, queXS; our paper form mark recognition and processing system, queXF; and our tool for describing questionnaires and producing paper forms, queXML) – we consider ourselves a “full service” LimeSurvey partner, in that we provide the “usual” LimeSurvey services such as installation, hosting, survey programming, customisation, and theme development, but also provide support and development of tools related to broader survey data collection, not limited to just LimeSurvey. We believe LimeSurvey is a fantastic tool that forms an integral part of survey data collection operations more broadly.

Q: Do you have a special tip for advanced LimeSurvey users?

A: Use the “survey logic file” often, especially before activating a survey. Some logic issues may not appear as errors in the logic file, but may become clear to you if you notice the expression manager syntax not being highlighted.

Q: Tell us about your most interesting or challenging LimeSurvey project.

A: One project which I believe has shown the power of LimeSurvey as a data collection tool, but also stressed its capacity to the limit is a project we are running for collecting data for a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). DCE’s (also known as choice modelling) techniques, involve constructing a set of items (called a “choice set”) and then asking respondents a selected subset of these items. For this to work, the questionnaire in LimeSurvey needs to be set up in a way that has all possible choice sets pre-loaded, and also know how to choose the particular subset to display to the respondent. For this we have made extensive use of array style questions, along with the fantastically powerful Expression Manager system.

Q: What do you consider the most important IT development at the moment?

A: Containers. Software such as Docker has changed the way services can be delivered to greatly increase server utilisation and reduce administration – which both lead cost savings and efficiency improvements. We have been maintaining a Docker container for LimeSurvey which allows for the quick installation or testing of LimeSurvey without the need to provision and configure server. This container now has over 100,000 pulls on Docker Hub.

If you would like to find out more about Adam & his team, please check their website. You can also address them questions on the forum.

In case you would like to find out more about our network of partners, please visit the following website.

LimeSurvey authorized partners from Argentina, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and the Netherlands introduced the services they offer (for example: support, installation, survey creation, customization, theme design, and training) and some of their very complex or very big survey projects done in the past.There was a hands-on demonstration of the new features of the upcoming LimeSurvey version 4, that you can already check out on https://devdemo.limesurvey.org. You can also try it out by downloading the development version from https://www.limesurvey.org/development-release. LimeSurvey 4 will be a huge step forward and will include many improvements both in the administration backend (where you will find among other features an integrated question preview and updated text editor), as well as performance improvement under the hood. Question themes, modules, and user roles are just a few of the highlights. Regarding the future development of LimeSurvey, founder and CTO Carsten Schmitz and the new CEO, Sebastian Wendrich stressed that LimeSurvey will forever remain free and open source.Details about the upcoming LimeStore were presented. LimeStore is the first place to visit when you are looking for extensions like plugins or themes. Even though LimeStore is still marked as beta, you can use it already to get access to plenty of free extensions, as well as extensions that can be unlocked by purchasing a Premium package (such as the 2-Factor-Authentication plugin developed by LimeSurvey GmbH). It will continue to grow and expand to cover the most diversified needs of the users.But besides all the fruitful discussions, interesting presentations, and insights into the further development of LimeSurvey, the LimeCon also was fun and helped to change the perspective on some issues. Did it help? Well, there is only one way to check that - follow us on one of the following social media channels to learn about the latest developments: Facebook Twitter Instagram Reddit Mastodon Xing LinkedIn

Blog

4 years ago

LimeInterview #3: Meet our partner "Survey Consulting"

Q: When and for what project did you use LimeSurvey the first time?We have started using LimeSurvey back in 2007 (ve ...

Q: When and for what project did you use LimeSurvey the first time?We have started using LimeSurvey back in 2007 (version 1.53). The goal was to connect LimeSurvey to a student management tool used by universities. LimeSurvey allowed students to rate the different courses they attended.Q: When did you start your business?A: May 2009 - we just celebrated our 10th anniversary!Q: Tell us about your company and your team.A: From what I can tell, we are the most experienced LimeSurvey partner with > 1.000 LimeSurvey projects dealt with. We are a very modern company and we can't even state "there are X employees at our office" because our team is spread all over the world. There is a designer in Austria, our software developers are from Germany, Argentina, India, and France, we have survey design experts in India, our JavaScript expert is located in Canada ... so we are a very international team of experts who connect globally for different LimeSurvey projects.Q: Are you or your colleagues active in the LimeSurvey community (forum or Discord chat)?A: Yes, for more than 10 years we are helping users on IRC or in the LimeSurvey forums. Watch out for user name "Mazi".Q: Which services do you offer as LimeSurvey authorized partner?A: Short answer: All services listed on www.limesurvey.com. In addition to that, we are running an online shop on https://survey-consulting.com/shop from where you can download professional LimeSurvey themes. We will soon publish plugins to enhance the power of LimeSurvey.We are also offering an Android app called "OfflineSurveys" for running LimeSurvey surveys offline. Check out www.offlinesurveys.com for more details.Q: Do you offer themes, questionnaires, or plugins in the LimeStore?Yes. We are currently offering some basic themes and plugins for free. Of course, we are developing many more at the moment.Q: Are there any plans for new plugins or services you are going to offer?Definitely! We are planning to release about 10 LimeSurvey plugins this year, as well as 5-6 professional LimeSurvey themes which will come with different theme options that can be easily adjusted according to the needs of the researcher.Q: Which is the most frequent customer request you receive?A: "Help, I accidentally de-activated my survey. Are my responses lost?"… and to answer that question right away: No, they are not!Since that is a support request received quite often, we have written some instructions on "How to restore data from a deactivated LimeSurvey survey" on our website. Q: Do you have a special tip for advanced LimeSurvey users?A: Yes. Even though it is a complex tool, you should read about the "LimeSurvey Expression Manager". It is a very powerful feature we are using a lot, especially for custom reports and doing calculations at survey runtime You can even store the calculated values as answers.Q: Tell us about your most interesting or challenging LimeSurvey project.A: That's a tough question since we have dealt with so many projects. WHO (World Health Organization) always challenges us with huge and complex surveys and there have been various projects which involved complex reporting dashboards. But overall, the most challenging project is the LimeSurvey adaptation we have developed together with "myradiotest" (http://myradiotest.com). They are using LimeSurvey to ask users to rate different songs. Based on that feedback, radio stations all over the world are adjusting their playlists. There are over 100 different radio stations using the tool. More than 1.000 surveys are being conducted every year. The adjusted LimeSurvey software includes a media player being automatically integrated into certain questions. We also created a mobile optimized LimeSurvey theme for this customer, working currently on extending the reporting dashboard offered to their customers. Once a year we are visiting the customer in Vienna to train the staff and discuss new features and future development.Q: What do you like most about LimeSurvey – besides being free, open source, and professional?A: We love the new plugin system and would love to see many more plugin events (they can be provided by any LimeSurvey user!). Same applies to the LimeSurvey API. There are many more things you could do by extending it. From our experience, we can confirm that more and more users have started connecting LimeSurvey to other tools used by their company or organization.Q: Is there anything you would like to see implemented in future releases of LimeSurvey?A: While it is possible to apply conditions for subquestions, we would love to have the possibility to apply conditions to answer options. For example, "List radio" questions would definitely benefit a lot from that.Q: What are you truly passionate about?A: Using new technology to speed up things and to make life easier for everyone. That's why we help improving LimeSurvey every day.

Blog

4 years ago

LimeInterview #1: Meet our partner "Tools for Reseach"

LimeSurvey is not only about the software itself, but also about the community that revolves around it. Community that p ...

The questions focus on how they first learned about LimeSurvey, how they work with the software, as well as the services developed by them for users. Today we will discuss with Tammo ter Hark, our partner from the Dutch company Tools for Research (Kleine Stappen), who actively helps users on our forum, providing also professional LimeSurvey and consulting services to clients who wish to use the software professionally. Tammo ter Hark Q: When and for what project did you use LimeSurvey the first time?A: We encountered LimeSurvey for the first time in 2009 while doing a project for an insurance company. That was both a success and a failure: we saw the possibilities of LimeSurvey at first sight and we jumped right in. We made one mistake: we developed a sophisticated theme (by standards of 2009) specifically for one survey, but forgot to ask the customer what browser they were using. That turned out to be Internet Explorer 6, which was in 2009 already very outdated.We successfully finished the project (eventually) by placing LimeSurvey (and XAMPP) on a USB stick, which was used on dedicated PCs in the offices of the customer (on PCs with modern browsers installed). So, in the end we could collect the data, learning at the same time a lot during our first LimeSurvey-related project. Of course, many others have followed.Q: When did you start your business?A: We started in 2009, after I left TNO (Dutch Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) and teamed up with Jan Ehrhardt to start "Tools for Research". Happily working since then in making the life of research professionals easier.Q: Tell us about your company and your team.A: The two of us still own "Tools for Research". In the meantime, we have built a great team around us - made of a talented graphic/UX designer, several psychologists, and survey colleagues - who is already ready to help when times get rough. Next to working with LimeSurvey, we have specialized in working with Drupal and WordPress. We work with organisations located all over the world, having many customers from the Netherlands and USA.Q: Are you or your colleagues active in the LimeSurvey community (forum or Discord chat)?A: I attend periodically the IRC meetings and read the forum almost daily, Jan being the guy that you would see on GitHub.Q: Which services do you offer as LimeSurvey authorized partner?A: We want to focus on building surveys with beautiful and very responsive themes, as well as on reporting through R and Rmarkdown.Q: Do you offer themes, questionnaires, or plugins in the LimeStore?A: In 2016 we developed our own theme (TFR Responsive), then for the 2.06 version of LimeSurvey. That was sold through the great store of Marcel Minke. There was (and still is) a free version on our website.We started working on a similar theme for LimeSurvey 3.x, which is now in development and freely available on GitHub. We are waiting for the LimeStore to open to have our theme(s) available there.Q: Are there any plans for new plugins or services you are going to offer?A: We would really like to team up with other developers to make reporting easier. Currently, the tools are not adequate for the needs of the organisations we work for. We use the open source software R for that, looking at the moment for ways to make the whole process easier, since R has a steep learning curve. We would love to work on combined screens and document reporting via Shiny and RMarkdown.Q: What would you recommend to a person who uses LimeSurvey for the first time?A: Start with small steps, do not try eat this elephant in one meal. Find a coach and learn by doing. Remember that many users will possibly use mobile phones (depending on your use case) and that several question types will look differently on mobile phones and large screens. Make sure you test your survey on multiple devices (browsers, PCs, tablets, and so on).Q: Do you have a special tip for advanced LimeSurvey users?A: Not really, but we would like to meet them to discuss how they tackle certain challenges.Q: Tell us about your most interesting or challenging LimeSurvey project.A: We needed to make sure that a group of young people with certain mental disabilities would answer a periodical survey (every two weeks). We developed a way of inviting them via SMS and making sure they could fill in the survey in 2 minutes. And send them a nice "thank you" message (also by SMS) as soon as they had finished the survey. This proved to work well, response rate was higher than expected, and the respondents felt "heard".Q: What are you truly passionate about?A: Making things easier.If you would like to find out more about Tammo & his team, please check their website. You can also address them questions on the forum.In case you would like to find out more about our network of partners, visit the following website�.