TL;DR: I’m a SE researcher and software engineer asking for guidance on collaborating with Blender engineers. I’m not a bot 
My name is Gunnar Kudrjavets, and I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Groningen who wants to survey some Blender engineers about code reviews and code velocity matters.
Why Blender? It used to be one of few open-source projects that used Phabricator (RIP, o mighty code collaboration tool, long live Gitea ;-)). Phabricator, in turn, exposed lots of valuable data related to code reviews that other platforms didn’t.
Context: our research is related to optimizing the code review process, looking at factors influencing the code review time, and differences between kernel and non-kernel code. In our past research papers, we mined the code review data from Phabricator and source control history to investigate those topics.
To further research some of our hypotheses, we would like to survey a subset of Blender committers (an electronic survey that should take 5-7 minutes with 18 questions) or even conduct in-person interviews if we find willing participants.
Do you have any suggestions about an acceptable or recommended way to contact a subset of Blender developers for a short survey?
We don’t want to spam people, burn bridges, or annoy anyone. And, yes, the Research Ethics Committee / IRB has reviewed and approved our survey
What we can offer in return is the acknowledgments in the paper, sharing the findings with the Blender community, and collaborating on potential new research projects that could help Blender developers to increase their productivity.
Please let me know if I can clarify or expand on anything.
Thank you for your time,
Gunnar