Dashcon

DashCon 2014

DashCon was conference to share techniques, tools, data sources and best practices around parsing, interpreting, visualizing and sharing Mozilla's internal data. It took place Tuesday, January 21st and Wednesday the 22nd, 2014, in Mozilla's San Francisco offices.

Talks were grouped based (very loosely) on general topic over the course of the conference.

The Ask

Mike Hoye opened the conference with a request: build out your dashboards with an eye towards both their use by management and opportunities for community engagement.

• Know your audience; show them why the information you're presenting matters, and why it should be a dashboard you'd come back to, not just a one-off report.
• Build opportunities to learn and participate into your dashboards. Every dashboard should include links back to:
  • The code
  • The data charted the site
  • A person they can ask followup questions, and
  • Usage tracking (e.g. Google Analytics)

Day 1 Morning Presentations: Process

• Intro, welcome and ask - Mike Hoye
• Dashboards For Community Management - David Eaves
• Heka demo - Rob Miller and Mike Trinkala
  • Heka on Github
  • Heka documentation
  • Live Heka aggregator.
• "Visual perception and Tableau"- Benjamin Sullins

These presentations are available at Air Mozilla.

Day 1 Afternoon Presentations: Data Sources

• SQL that makes reporting queries faster and easier - Selena Deckelmann
  • Gist at Github
• Diving Into Blackhole - Josh Matthews
  • Slides
• "Search Bugs Fast with Elasticsearch" -Kyle Lahnakoski
  • PDF documentation :Bugs in ES.
• Aggregating Version Control Info At Mozilla - Greg Szorc
  • Blog post.
  • Mozilla Developer Metrics on GitHub.
• BMO Native REST API Dave Lawrence (dkl)
  • The Bugzilla API.

These presentations are available at Air Mozilla.

Day 2 Morning Presentations: Current Projects

• "Visualizing Automated Test And Performance Data" - Jonathan Eads
  • Ode To A Data Model presentation
• "The Future of Webmaker's Dashboard" - Rick Eyre and Ali Dallal
  • The Webmaker dashboard on Github.
• "Release Readiness Dashboard" - Willie Cheong

These presentations are available at Air Mozilla.

Day 2 Afternoon Presentations: Guest Speakers

• "How Facebook uses metrics internally." - Bryan Brandow
• "Five key performance indicators that matter to Wikimedia" - Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation.
  • The Wikimedia metrics browser.
  • Who contributes code to Wikimedia?

Unfortunately we couldn't record Bryan's presentation, though we're thankful for his participation. Quim Gil's presentation is available at Air Mozilla.

Followup, and Thanks

Though we'll have a better sense of our success over the next few months as we learn more about community involvement and management decision-making around our data visualization efforts, DashCon was, in the near term, a successful event.

To follow up the conference, or if you've got an other questions about dashboard-making, we have a mailing list you can join.

I'd like to thank Ashley Sullivan, Diane Heffernan and Emily Pierce for their help organizing, securing funding and logistics of the event, and Lee Tom and Sheeri Cabral and the DBA team for their help on the day.

- Mike Hoye, January 2014.