Measuring Community Output

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The Ubuntu community is a large, inter-connected group of projects that work on different parts of the system. With such a huge collection of projects and contributors, keeping track of what is going on in the community can be difficult. Invariably, different parts of the community are often entirely unaware of some of the great work that goes on in the community. This is a shame, if we were better aware of the good work going on, we could better scale, integrate and work together on projects of shared interest.

In addition to this, it would be useful if we could better measure how effectiveness of the community in its many different areas. As with any large community, some teams will do less well than others, and if we can identify struggling teams better, this gives us an opportunity to help them along. A limited application of this has been used in the mentoring of LoCo teams. Although the mentoring experiment was successful, it is rather pointless if we can't determine which teams (a) need mentoring and (b) which teams can indeed mentor others.

This spec will discuss methods that could be used to effectively measure teams.

-- While there was of course quite some awareness about the importance of measuring already, it grew significantly a few weeks ago. We received mucho less CD's than expected. In a way, this was a good thing. It made us ask ourselves the question why we didn't receive more. This made people aware of a need for measuring our output. With numbers, we can demonstrate our relevance to Canonical & the foundation.

Some things one can easily measure with a minimum in locoteam infrastructure:

• number of active volunteers
  • number of people registered in Launchpad
    • number of people in Launchpad that have signe the Code of Conduct
• number of mailing list subscribers
• number of requests for a cd
• number of requests for a demo
• number of requests for a first installation
• amount of donations received
• numbers of forum posts
• number of events organised
  • number of people that came to a kiosk during events
• number of subscribers to ubuntu-cc.org news
• number of shops working with us
• number of blog entries in "ubuntu-cc" category

Mark Van den Borre, ubuntu-be.org

A yearly Audit of LOCOs asking

• How many members do they have?
• What are their goals for the year?
• How will they proceed to achieve these goals?
• Do they need any help?

Andrew Gaydon