No. 44

April 26, 2002


Technology:

SurveyMonkey

Ever since Zoomerang (see: Spotlight No. 27) effectively booted me out of its service by increasing its subscription fee to $599 per year, I've been on the lookout for a similarly powerful, flexible, and easy to use survey tool. Most of my surveying needs exceed the draconian limits placed on Zoomerang's free service (20 questions per survey, no more than 50 responses, results stored for 10 days only) but do not justify the relatively big expense of paid subscription. Ironically, the company that gave us one of the most flexible survey creation tools, opted for inflexibility when it comes to pricing plans, offering no gradation between the free service and the $599 "overkill". Makes no sense, if you ask me.

It is therefore with great joy that I present to you SurveyMonkey - a tool nearly identical with Zoomerang in terms of features, but priced at a much more reasonable $19.95 per month. The ability to cross-tabulate responses and the huge selection of templates (pre-made surveys that can be customized) appear to be the only Zoomerang features missing from SurveyMonkey. On the other hand, the latter places no restriction on the number of question in a survey (Zoomerang limits it to 30 for the paying subscribers...) and supports "conditional logic", i.e. branching through different survey paths, depending on the respondent's answer. In light of this it is probably safe to say that SurveyMonkey comes significantly ahead of its competitor in terms of both features and price.

SurveyMonkey:

Creating a survey
Survey results

Initiative:

Athena Alliance
Exploring the Promise and Pitfalls of the Global Information Economy

From the Web site: "Athena Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to public education and research on the emerging global information economy and the networked society. Athena Alliance seeks to bring together organizations and individuals to help meet the challenges posed by the emerging information economy-with special attention to the problems of economic development in communities-left-behind and communities-at-risk. "

Initiative:

OpenSource Café

  • From the announcement: "Open Source Café project [is] one of the first activities of NOSI - the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. The Café is an innovative way to expose organizations in the nonprofit community to the wonders of open source software. It’s nothing more than a traveling booth, equipped with networked laptops connected to the Internet and loaded with open source software, that will be travelling to a variety of non-profit conferences through the year. By offering a central place for conference attendees to check email, surf the Net, or edit documents, The Café provides a free place for people to explore Linux and other open source software; some for the first time. This project was initiated by Steve Gray of the Legal Services Technology Network, and will be co-sponsored by NOSI and LSTechNet."

Online reading:

  • Emerging indicators of success and failure in borderless higher education
    • By Dr Yoni Ryan. In: Observatory Reports, Issue 2, February 2002.
    • This highly readable report provides a critical overview of high-profile failures and successes in the area of "borderless higher education" (also known as "distance learning") in recent years, both in the US and abroad. It looks at a broad range of patterns and factors that may determine which educational venture will succeed and which will falter, and offers advice to university administrators contemplating borderless education initiatives on how to steer clear of the pitfalls.
    • [Available as a PDF file
 

She said, he said:

"The first question to ask yourself when looking at new technology is not ‘Will it run on my server?’ but rather ‘Would I use it?’" - Clay Shirky


© 2002 Vlad Wielbut and the Alliance for Community Technology