Gammon Forum

I don't normally support ads on this forum, however this email that I received recently looks relevant to mudding, so I publish it in case anyone on the forum wants to do this survey ...

Dear MUD developers and friends:

We are faculty members in the Jones school of management at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA (you may verify this by doing a Google search under Lisa Klein or Paul Dholakia). We are conducting an academic research project studying different types of social interactions on the internet, and its influence on participants from a sociological perspective.

In this regard, we are conducting a survey of members belonging to e-mail groups, chat-rooms, and perhaps most importantly MUDs, seeking information on different elements of their thoughts, feelings, and motivations for participating in the group, as well as questions about the group’s value to them... The survey is available for answering on the web at the following URL:

http://www.surveypro.com/cgi-bin/surveypro/run_survey.cgi?id=2458

Of course, this research is strictly academic, and has no commercial motives or interests whatsoever. We hope to publish this research in a sociology or communications journal.

As a small token of our appreciation for participants' time, and in the spirit of the philosophy underlying the internet, we will donate $250 each (a total of $500) to two organizations/ groups/ charities of our participants' choice (we ask participants to nominate their favorite groups in the survey). We will randomly select two groups or organizations from the nominations of all completed responses.

We are writing to seek your help in conducting this research, first through participating, and second, through encouraging other regular MUD users that you might know because of your leadership role in such communities to participate in the research. This will not take more than ten or fifteen minutes of your (and their time). We would be deeply appreciative of any help that you can provide through participating, or passing on information about this research to MUD users.

If you have any questions, please e-mail us (Lisa at lklein@rice.edu) or (Paul at dholakia@rice.edu). Thank you very much for supporting our research.

Best wishes,

Lisa Klein, Assistant Professor, Rice University Web-page: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lklein

Paul Dholakia, Assistant Professor, Rice University Web-page: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia