1. Purpose and procedure

This study investigates how people design ggplot2 extensions, with a particular focus on how people turn existing plotting code into reusable helper functions. We are interested in your experience regardless of your level of expertise — whether you’ve written a single one-off function for yourself or maintain a published package, your perspective is useful to this research.

You will be asked to complete a short online survey (~5-10 minutes) covering your background with ggplot2, your experience (if any) writing plotting helper functions, and your reactions to some strategies discussed in the accompanying talk. At the end, you can optionally provide an email address to be considered for a follow-up interview (~30–45 minutes).

Providing an email address for follow-up is a separate decision from participating in an interview. Being contacted does not commit you to anything — the interview itself is covered by its own, separate ethics application and consent process, which you will be asked to agree to independently if you’re invited to take part.

2. Data collected

No sensitive personal data (health, financial, political opinions, etc.) is collected, and no compensation or prize incentive is offered for completing this survey.

Note on anonymity in practice: while no single field in this survey directly identifies you, an unusual combination of role, experience level, and free-text answers could in principle be recognisable to someone who knows you, especially if you’re one of few respondents from a particular event or background. Please keep this in mind when writing free-text answers.

3. Legal basis for data processing

Your data are processed on the basis of your freely given, informed consent, in accordance with Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR.

4. Data storage, processing, and retention

Survey responses are collected via SoSci Survey, a third-party survey provider hosted on servers in Germany. SoSci Survey acts as a data processor on our behalf under a GDPR Art. 28 data processing agreement; no data collected here is transferred to any other third party. After initial collection, data is processed only by the research team (LMU-affiliated).

Survey responses are collected anonymously: no participant ID, IP address, or other identifier links a submission to you, so once you submit the survey we cannot locate or delete your specific responses — there is nothing in the data that identifies which submission was yours.

Any email address provided for interview follow-up is the only personal data collected in this study. It is stored separately from your survey answers, is never linked to them, and can be fully deleted at any time on request by contacting the PI — it is also deleted automatically once the interview stage of the project is complete.

Anonymised research data will be retained for at least 10 years after publication in line with DFG good scientific practice guidelines, and may be deposited in a public repository in fully de-identified, aggregated form.

5. Your rights under GDPR

Because your survey responses are collected anonymously, we cannot identify which submission is yours, so we are unable to access, correct, restrict, or delete an individual response after it has been submitted.

If you have provided an email address for interview follow-up, you retain full rights over that data at any time:

• Access the data we hold about you (Art. 15 GDPR)
• Rectify inaccurate data (Art. 16 GDPR)
• Erase your data (Art. 17 GDPR)
• Restrict processing (Art. 18 GDPR)
• Data portability (Art. 20 GDPR)
• Object to processing (Art. 21 GDPR)
• Lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority: Bayerischer Landesbeauftragter für den Datenschutz (BayLfD) — the competent authority for public bodies such as LMU (not the BayLDA, which covers the private sector).

To exercise any of these rights, contact the PI or the Data Protection Officer above.

6. Voluntary participation and withdrawal

Participation is entirely voluntary. You may stop at any point before submitting by closing the browser window; incomplete responses are deleted. Because responses are collected anonymously, once you submit the survey we cannot identify or withdraw your specific response — if you want the ability to withdraw after the fact, please do not submit, or withdraw before that point. If you provided an email address for interview follow-up, you may withdraw that consent and request its deletion at any time, as described in Section 5.

7. Declaration of consent

By selecting “Yes” below, you confirm that you have read and understood the information above, have had the opportunity to ask the research team questions (contact details above), and consent to participate in this study and to the processing of your data as described.