On 23/11/14 20:41, Ross Gardler (MS OPEN TECH) wrote:
> Metrics do not provide this information, and indeed can detract from the > community health issues. In looking at http://projects.bitergia.com/apache-cloudstack/browser/, I'm wondering if any meaningful metrics can be provided. Take for example, Mailing List metrics. 1,690 thread initiators 1,467 first replies 1,973 participants; Does that mean almost 10% of the threads did not receive a response? Or, as is more likely, those are part of existing threads, but due to defective email clients, appear to be new threads? >My point is that while some metrics can provide indicators of something that >needs looking into we need to ensure that the metrics do not become more >important than community health. +1 Going back to that Mailing List metric, is it useful to know that roughly 1.4 people participate in each thread, when those metrics give no indication of whether or not the responses help the person initiating the thread? >The danger I see is that providing official metrics > a) provides a level of "authority" to the metrics which most newcomers are ill-equipped to evaluate an > b) could lead to shortcut rules like "the metrics must show there is X level of diversity/activity/volume/foobar" >replacing proper evaluation of the project and its community. Using "user support" for Apache OpenOffice as an example. My sense is that the general user population uses https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/ rather than us...@openoffice.apache.org. I'm aware of a non-Apache project where the only reliable support is IRC. The web-forum, mailing list, and other channels don't provide any indication of that factoid, though. A metric that just looks at mailing list activity falls short for projects where most interaction occurs on either web forums, or IRC channels. Metrics are useful indicators, but only when: * What they measure is clearly indicated; * What they don't measure is clearly indicated; * What their blind points are, is clearly indicated; * They measure what they purport to measure; Even with all those criteria, metrics will be misquoted, and otherwise abused, to push a point. jonathon * English - detected * English * English <javascript:void(0);>
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