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  • Stef 10:04 am on 30 July, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: cls, , metrics, opensourceway, ,   

    Measuring Community Growth 

    The discussion held a few weeks ago at Community Leadership Summit around how to ‘measure’ open source projects were very interesting. There was even a keynote by David Eaves during OSCON about the topic (well worth 15 minutes of your time, watch it below).

    There are many people comparing different open source projects, I keep seeing blog posts trying to extrapolate complex concepts from too simple facts. For example, it’s hard to evaluate if an open source project is growing just by looking at the total number of commits per week: when number of commits slow down it may mean that the codebase has reached maturity, not necessarily it’s a sign of diminishing interest. Other simple facts visible on github like the number of followers, forks or ‘watchers’ may not mean much if the developers of that project don’t use the ‘social’ features offered by github.

    To measure the “growth” of a project I usually look at a whole bunch of numbers and trends (more importantly) like the total number of committers over time, total new committers over time and also things that are not code-related traffic on mailing lists/forums, websites, google searches, activity on bug trackers as indicators of growth of a community. The total number of commits is more meaningful when taken as one element of ‘livelihood’ of a project (is it still maintained?) but it needs to be integrated with other elements to avoid making mistakes.

    All the people interested in measuring open source communities should join the Metrics Working Group at The Open Source Way and push the conversation forward.

     

  • Stef 4:27 pm on 25 October, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , metrics,   

    Measuring code contributions to Openstack 

    Following the rule “you cannot improve what you cannot measure” I started putting together a system to measure engagement in OpenStack community. There are lots of factors to take into account for engagement of members of a community. With OpenStack I started from code, I will keep adding other sources of data that will help me drive engagement up.

    This post is mostly about the progress I made using CVSanaly to dig into OpenStack git repositories, build a database from the git logs and extract useful information from it. CVSanaly is a tool developed under a EU sponsored project (FLOSSmetrics) and currently maintained by a few universities.

    For the curious among us, I documented the steps to populate the CVSanaly database with data from OpenStack git repos on a new wiki page. You’ll find there also the implementation details of the reports that answer questions like: Who commited to an OpenStack repo, how many times in the past 30 days? See the demo report built with Pentaho Reporting representing the total number commits per repository in past 30 days (pdf).

    The long term vision is to have a self service dashboard where anybody can slice and dice all data about OpenStack community, code, bugs, interaction on mailing list and irc and more. I’m experimenting with Pentaho and Jaspersoft tools, still not sure how to proceed. If you have experience with them let me konw. I’m also hoping that Mozilla releases more details about the implementation of Mozilla Metrics project (still under wraps, after a premature leak a few days ago).

     

  • Stef 10:01 am on 30 April, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , metrics, social currency   

    Social Currency as a tool for community managers 

    I see a world of games, competitions, fun to be added to online communities using social currency platforms.

    Social currency is shared information that encourages further social encounters. It’s not a new concept, but the social web increases its prevalence. In the web-based collaboration software platform called Rypple, a simple act of thanking someone on a team and using a badge as a way to show your gratitude is a form of social currency. A platform called Badgeville promises to add virtual rewards to your digital media property through leaderboards and virtual “badges” that act as reinforcements to reward certain behaviors and encourage others.

    via Serious Play: The Business of Social Currency – David Armano – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

     

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