We will present some typical community management worries about communityhealth, productivity and visibility and how some open source tools could beused to face them. Open source development transparency allows community tobehave as data scientists and extract valuable information.
During last years, we have seen the growth of an specific position in manycompanies and OSS foundations. You might have seen them as “communitymanagers”, “developer advocates”, “developer relations”, etc. All of themshare some goals / responsibilities in common with their communities: health,productivity and visibility. How to achieve them?
It has been said that “without data, you are another person with an opinion”,and management shouldn’t rely in opinions but facts. This path increasestransparency, trust and reduces conflicts, since usually “numbers speak louderthan opinions”.
If we look around in our daily live many of us are already working with toolsfor similar goals in different areas of life. We can wear heart rate monitors,check our activity in github or jira and play with zillions of marketingcampaigning tools.
In OSS communities people “contribute” for a goal. So, we should start bylooking at where people are contributing, and here starts the “communitymanager nightmare”. People contribute in a lot of places: github, gerrit,jira, mailing lists, slack, meetup, etc. It seems obvious which data sourceswe have and since most of us are technical people, we might build our owntools for tracking them. Have you already gone through that path? Some of ourbest friends have gone, wasting 80% taking data instead of taking decisions.Lots of places to look at, mainly silos of data you need to massage to getinformation out of them, and limited amount of time understand and manage yourproject.
During this talk, we will present some community managers typical questionsand how tools OSS, like for example GrimoireLab, could be used to answer them,allowing the community to behave as data scientists extracting valuableinformation from within and be a data driven community.
These kind of tools represent a new ecosystem for “Open DevelopmentAnalytics”, where communities can (and probably should) rely on open tools toensure transparency on such important process like “measuring the community”. |