Using formr to run studies: we recommend self hosting

[rubenarslan]

For a long time, the University of Göttingen made access to their local instance freely available on formr.org. This was an easy way to be able to create and run studies. Unfortunately, owing to the growth in number of users, this instance now runs slowly and is sometimes unavailable. There are currently no funds to increase the server capacity. New account and new study/run creation has been disabled.

For this reason, but also because more and more people want assurances about data protection, we now recommend self hosting formr at your own university/lab/company. Formr is open source software and we have made some installation instructions available here. However, we have found that labs without the requisite technical expertise sometimes struggle to make formr securely available. We have provided a check list and we can also offer to check your instance for obvious security leaks. However, we cannot offer assistance with debugging problems with the instance.

If you want to self host formr, you can also hire the consulting services of a company I founded, Rform Research Mixtapes UG. The company will install a dockerised version of formr on a commercial server or on university hosting. This is a setup we have optimised for data security and stability. You will fully control the server, we will provide the technical expertise as well as support with creating studies. Doing so is of course also a way to help fund the continued development of formr. Just get in touch and let us know about your requirements, especially the peak number of active participants you expect.

There are instances of formr already running at multiple universities. If you contact me from an institutional email address that already has an instance, I'll try to introduce you to the lab maintaining that instance.