[GTALUG] Survey Software, was Re: [GTALUG-Announce] Meeting 14th April, 2015 at 7:30 pm

[Christopher Browne]

One question that we noticed at the ops meeting that we wanted asked
(and I'm asking it now, early, so as to encourage any needful
research!) was...

Does anyone know of some good open source/free software for managing
surveys?  We have put together a survey or two in the recent past
using the Google Forms framework, which was easy enough and useful
enough, but decidedly not "free enough" in enough senses of "free."

There are a number of senses of "ideal" that may wind up conflicting;
there are lots of potential disqualifying factors that might readily
leave us without any options, alas.

There are some open source options that seem likely to taunt us with
the complexity of the installation requirements
  - LimeSurvey.org taunts me with the number of things in addition to
PHP 5.3 that it requires
  - surveyproject.org is open source, but, being written using
C#/.NET, likely would require horrendous efforts to get it to run atop
a Linux-based system
  - https://open.jira.com/wiki/display/WST/Home taunts me with the
number of .jar/.war files required

What I *want* is something that doesn't need managing a wholesale Web
Framework in order to work.  (Heh, it's "just a matter of writing a
bit of Drupal code!!!")

I do observe some comparative analyses:
<http://www.surveyproject.org/Survey%E2%84%A2/Comparisons/tabid/128/Default.aspx>,
<http://jspsurveylib.sourceforge.net/FeatureTable.html>

There are plenty of proprietary options (there's a wikipedia analysis
that doesn't recognize the existence of anything else!!!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_survey_software>) which
should have some obvious downsides in that:
 a) You donate control to someone else;
 b) You have to share data with someone else;
 c) Your data may be forced to pass through a foreign nation's
intelligence service's hands (and I have seen people express dismay at
that)

I'm a bit surprised that someone hasn't constructed some sort of
"little language" for this.  Actually, I'm wrong; there's an ACM paper
exactly about that.
<http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1593181&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=647881351&CFTOKEN=98404018>
<http://www.cs.olemiss.edu/~hcc/papers/surveyLangFinal.pdf>  But
that's only one component of a solution, so it shouldn't be surprising
that there's not a package for that.

At any rate, it IS clear that there are plenty of companies doing a
lot of business running surveys, and working pretty hard to offer
simple-to-use solutions.  People are, in particular, using Google's
survey mechanisms a lot, and I hear SurveyMonkey mentioned a lot.  "We
could do that" for some of our simple, non-critical survey needs, but
it would be nice to have something more under our control.  Perhaps
someone has gone far enough down this road to have seen more answers
than are obvious here.