The Insight Software Consortium is making long term plans for the continued prosperity of ITK. This survey will help us serve the community better and keep the toolkit viable and relevant to the scientific community for decades to come.
Before distributing the survey, we would like your feedback on its content along with how and where it is distributed.
We currently plan on re-distributing the survey every year on this forum. We also plan to provide links to the survey in the ITK Software Guide, the ITK Examples, and the ITK repository Markdown documentation.
One suggestion: prior to the first question, you might ask people in what capacity they use ITK (e.g. developing code using ITK as a framework vs. using an application like Slicer that depends on ITK but where it’s kind of hidden). This could clarify what it means to “use” ITK every day.
I’m also curious how many commercial products use ITK in one way or another. I’ll be it’s a lot and maybe some of those users would be willing to check a box on the survey so we’d a have a sense of how big that community is.
Anyway it’ll be interesting to hear what you learn from this.
As for the domains of the respondent, I’d add the “Please, specify” option if “Other” is chosen.
I’m wondering whether we should add “Veterinary” and “Archaeology” as other options.
Also, I’d ask them about the specific ITK area (e.g. segmentation, registration, etc.) that they mostly use/would like to have improvements on.
As for the publications, I’d prompt respondents to provide the references, and if that is too time consuming, the number of publications.
May be asking about their funded projects involving ITK would also give us an idea of the extent to which ITK is useful. Providing the details of the funding agency, file reference and amount would be great, but may be would put people back from responding.
Finally, I’d use a single dollar sign in the ranges in last question to avoid verbosity.
As far as I can tell, Other is a fixed field name for the Google Forms Multiple Choice optional entry.
Good idea – added.
Added to the question description to help seed thoughts but not constrain answers to these areas.
Good idea. A request has been added to the description: For recent publications, please provide citable references.
Yes – ideally we keep most questions devoid of personal information so the results can be shared freely. Currently, we have a contact email, which will be kept confidential.
We also want to keep the survey length minimal to avoid fatigue.
Fixed.