User:Jcleeland

Jason Cleeland



Jason Cleeland is an IT Manager from Victoria, Australia.

Born: 26 Feb 1970

Favourite Colour: Green

Preferred Football Code: Australian Rules

Favourite Team: Brisbane Lions

Food Preference: Sugary

My Little History of LimeSurvey

In 2001 Jason Cleeland was employed as IT Manager with the Community and Public Sector Union in Victoria, Australia. The organisation ran a lot of paper-based surveys, and in this particular year was running a survey of over 3000 members in relation to an Enterprise Bargaining claim.

The vast quantity of paper responses that needed to be entered into a database was too much for the relatively small staffing resources of the union, and so it was outsourced to the ACTU call centre for assistance.

To make it easier for multiple users across multiple sites to perform data-entry in a single database, Jason figured it'd make sense to have a web-based data entry screen for the survey. And with a blindingly useful bit of foresight (unbeknownst to him at the time), he figured it'd be worth writing a script that could be easily modified to handle future surveys - and not have to hard-code the data entry screen for every new survey.

Thus LimeSurvey was born.

Being an Open Source addict, Jason convinced his employers that it would be worthwhile releasing the code to PHPSurveyor (as LimeSurvey was then known) to the world via Sourceforge. Within a few months the code was being downloaded by quite a few people.

A couple of web-coders in a Texas Community Television Station contacted Jason a few months after the code was released on Sourceforge wanting to help out. And from that point on PHPSurveyor started to take on a life of it's own.

Although there was some assistance from outside coders during the first 3 years of the projects life, the vast bulk of coding was all performed by Jason, who became - unexpectedly - a one-man coding and support team for PHPSurveyor. Thousands of suggestions, complaints and questions were handled during this time, and the project leapt to the top 100 downloads from Sourceforge.

In 2005, due to some personal crises, and lack of time Jason put out a call for assistance with PHPSurveyor. Carsten Schmitz (now project leader) responded to the call and expanded his role from translator to developer, and finally - in early 2006 Jason handed the project leadership to Carsten who has taken the project on to even bigger and greater things.

After taking a year off, Jason returned to the project as a developer.