Gather – Yes! Another F’in Survey Application! Part 1

Ok, ummmmm ….. Yeah I know there is a billion online survey options, corporate survey solutions, survey developer packages, and even open source survey software. Why would I choose to develop another survey application to pollute the survey realm, especially as my first open source project?

When you ask someone which survey platform or service they use, You will get a completely different answer for each person asked! Also, none of the answers include an open source platform.

What is the top used survey service? I can’t really answer this. Weird. This is either going to be good exercise to learn what not to do, and/or this is such a difficult problem that there is no ultimate solution. Either way I feel this is going to be a huge level up in my knowledge faction.

Besides all the zen I will gain, I enjoy collecting data and helping make some sense of the heap of information that has been collected. I have been doing this for most of my development career. Not specifically with survey data, but with many types of data collections: financial, performance, purely informational, behavioral … the types of data collected is endless.

Now, why are there so many survey software options?
1. Every company or person needs to collect feedback, do some kind of research, and get general input. Best and easiest way is to have a questionnaire or survey. Obviously, there is a huge need for this type of application and a lot users to go around support all the survey applications out there.
2. Point one lead me to this assumption, that maybe it is one of the easiest opportunities to make money in software. Get your application the highest rank on google or on the first page and you’re guaranteed to get some subscribers. Regardless if your survey software is good or not.

What is going to be different or better in this software? Nothing, I am going to replicate every useful feature that is available today. Ok, there will be some differences, but nothing to do with functionality: no crazy marketing and no fees. Oh, and it will be open source. Surprisingly there is not that many choices in the open source world, and if there is, I found they are not very active.

I originally made this software with ASP.net MVC for a project, I have been working hard converting all the features to Ruby on Rails, and I am grateful I made this decision. This helped me reduce the price of using the software to free. Also, Ruby and me seem to work really well together!

Gather Check out the demo, create a survey, tell me what you hate or need, find a bug … anything helps. I am doing test type releases, currently version 0.2, I hope to get to the next milestone v0.3 soon. Once I get to version 0.9 it will go beta, then of course full stable release when it eventually gets to 1.0. You can track the progress on GitHub.

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