use Perl

What an inauspicious start to this new chapter of your life. I'm really sorry to hear about your rotten experience with Dolphin Square and their unreasonableness to come up with a more agreeable resolution to your change in circumstances.

The only thing I can suggest is to keep records and photographs of the incidents where the service they are providing you is less than satisfactory and look to terminating your contract with them earlier if they're not fulfilling their obligations.

--
Rosellyne Thompson

Dave Cross and I (and Rozallin Thompson, I believe)

Yep, I shall be there.

I have some experience of designing and administering questionnaires and analysing questionnaire data, both from my academic studies and in my current and previous jobs, and this is why I agree with dagolden that we need to enlist the services of a PR firm specialising in reputation analysis. I seem to recall seeing a talk at a London.pm workshop/tech meeting about how a company[1] was using Perl/NLP techniques to do just that for major corporate brands, but purely on a statistical level like brandwatch.net does. Since our question is not just what people think but also why, I think we'd also need to conduct field research at universities, tech conferences/meetings and at companies across several countries, so I can't imagine this research would be quick or cheap.

That said if this isn't possible, and the majority of the community is willing to accept the caveats and problems with an enthusiastic, amateur approach, I'm willing to help out.

[1] I can't for the life of me remember its name and I've looked through the schedules to no avail.