Transana may be inexpensive, but it's not cheap.

Transana is Open Source software. The source code is freely available for developers who want to modify or enhance the program to meet their own specific needs.

Some Open Source software is developed by volunteers, working cooperatively. Another model for Open Source software development is when a small number of developers work for pay, with their salaries funded from donations, payments for the software, and grants. This is the model that Transana development follows. Transana’s primary funding source at present is the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, a research institute that is part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education.

Donations from users are a crucial element in how we fund Transana. Donations provide money to pay salaries and buy necessary equipment. Transana is developed on a very small budget, and even small donations can make a difference. But user donations are also a crucial measure of how important Transana is to the people who use it. Such concrete financial support from the user community underscores our argument to potential funders about how badly this software is needed.

There are many ways to contribute to Transana development. One option for individuals is to contribute through our project donations web page. Another alternative is to mail contributions to:

University of Wisconsin Foundation
US Bank Lockbox, PO Box 78236
Milwaukee, WI 53278-0236

Please be sure to include the fund name (Wisconsin Center for Education Research Fund, Transana development) and the account number (12300684) with your check to make sure your donation is distributed to the appropriate fund.

A Unique Product

Qualitative video analysis software is a niche market. A product like Transana meets a specific need, but is not commercially viable; there will never be enough users to fully support Transana development through fee-based distribution. Commercial qualitative packages such as NVivo 2.0 do not directly support the analysis of video. Other tools that do support video, such as Atlas/ti, Qualrus and HyperResearch, are designed to work with small edited video clips, not with large libraries of raw or unedited videos. Transana’s unique features make it ideally suited for sophisticated, large-scale video analysis, but make it impractical to market through traditional channels.

Transana at WCER

Transana's development is coordinated by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Transana is a logical fit at WCER, where the focus is on facilitating research in education. Much of the Transana development work has been funded by subcontracts from other, larger, National Science Foundation-funded projects, such as Talkbank and NPACI. Those projects have ended and current funding for additional development is limited.

The Transana project has secured an agreement that will allow the continued distribution of Transana indefinitely, both in the form of executable files and the Open Source source code. The distrubution of Transana is extremely cost-effective. However, program support for current users and ongoing development does incur significant expense. Therefore while older versions of Transana will continue to be available for free indefinitely, the development team must secure additional funding in order to continue to support and improve the program. To this end, we are starting to charge for Transana executables as of the Transana 2.20 release.

You Can Help with Distributed Funding

One approach to funding a program like Transana is distributed funding. If a number of research projects make contributions to Transana funding, development can continue. If you are writing a grant proposal, please include a request for money for Transana development. Consider what you’d have to spend on software if Transana were a fully-commercial product. How many copies of the program would you need for yourself, your colleagues, your graduate students, and your transcribers? While Transana has no direct competitors, analogous text-based qualitative analysis software costs approximately US$500 per copy in single-user versions. Multi-user versions with shared databases and real-time synchronization aren't available for any price.

A small grant proposal could include US$1,200 to $1,500, as an example. A larger proposal, where several researchers may be using Transana could request $5,000. This sort of funding could provide Transana with a stable financial base for ongoing support and program development, helping keep the woftware affordable for everyone. Even if your request for Transana funding is denied, it’s beneficial to us for funding agencies to see requests for it. When they see the types of projects that use Transana, and when they get repeated requests to fund its development, they are more likely to approve future requests.

Sample Grant Proposal: Include this description of Transana in your grant proposals in order to justify your need for funds to support it.

University departments that have professors, researchers, and students using Transana should also consider making a donation. You pay for other software to facilitate research. Paying for Transana can help ensure that support continues and that new program improvements can be developed.

Funding Custom Development

If you have specific features that you would like to see added to Transana, you could request between $20,000 and $100,000 for a specific development project. Please contact the developers to discuss this in advance.

Join the Transana Support and Development Teams

WCER staff currently provides all program support for Transana. As the program becomes more popular, support requests are increasing. If members of the user community volunteer to provide program support, the development staff is free to focus on maintenance and development of new features.

You can join the support team now. Contact the developers, and they’ll add your address to the list of addresses that are notified when someone posts to the Transana discussion board. When a post comes in, you can look at it and see if you have anything to add; if so, post a response to the board.

Other needs include articles about how you are using Transana, translations of Transana into languages other than those currently supported, demo videos in languages other than English, and additional program documentation.

Volunteer to Work on Transana

If you have programming experience, and are interested in working on Transana, contact the developers. There are a number of projects, large and small, that could easily be adopted by motivated developers. Some projects, such as expanding support for new video formats, require a degree of expertise, but other projects, such as adding new reports, can be accomplished by people with limited programming experience. The developers are available to provide guidance to all volunteer developers as needed.

What Features Could Additional Funding Provide?

We have many ideas about how to build on the success Transana has seen so far. Some of these are already in the works. Additional funding will allow us to:

• Add new analytic tools, such as graphical displays of the developing analytic structure, interactive reports, and new coding schemas.
  
  
• Implement additional data search and exploration tools, such as global transcript text searching and keyword proximity searching.
  
  
• Improve data sharing tools and develop new collaborative models.
  
  
• Create and improve tools for automated video trans-coding, solving major startup and dissemination issues.
  
  
• Create dissemination tools that allow researchers to share their analysis, and the video that supports their conclusions with colleagues.