Limesurvey in Via Libre

The first time I heard about PHPsurveyor was in 2005 when Magaly and I were planing to do online surveys in Via Libre for the Via Net project. This project was a collaboration of three institutions Via Libre, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and the University of Washington. Of these three institutions only the University of Washington had a tool to do online surveys: WebQ/Catalyst . So, that was our first and only option. However, Marc Redmond one of our collaborators told us about the importance to use PHPsurveyor in the future. He thought this tool was perfect to do research in Peru because it is open source and there is a version in Spanish among other advantages. Marc was working in the SHAPE project of the School of Social Work of the University of Washington. In that project he was envolved in online surveys to do HIV prevention.
To learn how to use this tool we needed a server and a smart person. Fortunately, we found it: Luis Maguina. We tested this new tool with him in the Via Libre server. He soon learned how to deal with the basic commands but he coudn't use the email and token options. Once Jesus Castagneto showed up in Via Libre and he gave some ideas to Luis to solve that problem. But there was some changes in Via Libre (new server and Luis left Via Libre) and we coudn't finish our lessons of PHPsurveyor. In 2006 we continued learning PHPsurveyor with the team of Epired (Arturo Villarino and Luis). But we coudnt finish to understand all the benefits of this tool. There was a change in name from PHPsurveyor to LimeSurvey. Finally, we discovered all the advandtages of the tool with the help of Milagros Zorrilla. We used Limesurvey in the Project Somos to test the effectiveness of some videos to improve the HIV testing. And now we are still using it in other survey among people living with HIV in Peru. We wrote an abstract about our experience with LimeSurvey in the AIDS 2008 conference.