Foundation/Metrics/Contributor Dashboard: Difference between revisions

For anyone reading this document who is not as close to Mozilla terminology, ‘Contributor’ is the name given to people who go ‘above and beyond’ in the actions they take to support Mozilla. These are the people who make the Mozilla community what it is. Contribution is not a single thing, and there are infinite levels of possible ways to contribute to Mozilla, but for the sake of metrics, we’re going to count the number of people who take one of an agreed list of actions.  

In metrics terms, we are treating contribution as a threshold people can pass, though in practice we know it is much more complex than this. We believe that counting at this threshold is the most useful metric for us to work with to focus our efforts to build the community.

For the Mozilla Foundation specific dashboard that this plan relates too, our Contributor criteria is aligned with the Active Contributor and Core Contributor levels of engagement in David Boswell's blog posts. We are not sub-dividing types of Contributor (at least not for now).

We will measure, test and optimize all sorts of metrics in order to understand and improve the impact of our actions, but the agreed number that matters above all others for the Mozilla Foundation is ‘Number of Active Contributors’.

This is a powerful proxy KPI to measure the combined effectiveness of all the different things we work on, and how well we collaborate and embrace the wider Mozillian community.

* Are we working in a way that best enables the community, and in turn supports the mission?

''<nowiki>*</nowiki> “Ship” is useful internal parlance to focus our activities, but “work with”/“recruit”/“engage”/“enable” are a reasonable fit to explain what we are doing. I’m cautious with the language around this which can sometimes make our community sound more passive than they are.''

=== 1. Find the ‘single source of truth’ ===

** Blackhole (final name TBC) & MoCo BI Data Warehouse

*** These existing projects have already invested time in tackling the data problem and are merging in some form. Further info here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Systems

However, we are not going to wait for the perfect end-goal datastore before building out the other components that will be needed for our dashboard. We are going to start work right away on the front-end of our dashboard, and also the queries that will extract contribution activity from our existing scattered databases. These components will be built with the intention of re-use with the end-goal datastore, but can also be wired up now to form an interim solution that will give the Foundation partial visibility of Contributor numbers earlier in the year.

=== Components to build now ===

==== 2. Front-end(s) ([http://adamlofting.github.io/mofo-contributors-dashboard/ Demo]) ====

* Usable for cross mofo and at mofo team level dashboards

* Single HTML page for screens (also suitable for display on screens in offices)

* Will be used with the final datastore

* TEST: [http://adamlofting.github.io/mofo-contributors-dashboard/ Prototype is here]

** Cross-team collaboration will save time where there are shared datastores

* We can work through these in priority of where the biggest number of contributors sit

* These queries will extract contributor counts for now, but should be re-usable later to extract raw contribution data and to feed into the ‘single source of truth’ datastore

* API SPEC: [https://docs.google.com/a/mozillafoundation.org/document/d/16Sas-dbBzSftWqacYhFRojjXLCkAXu6h2XxbkfALG-Q/edit# In development here (contribution welcome)]

* This will be the short-term back-end to our dashboards

* A place to join up the counts from our existing data sources

* This will be replaced by the ‘single source of truth’ datastore in the long run

* Expose the numbers via an API to use with the Front-end, and to enable others to build on top of this

 

* I suspect across the teams there may be ad-hoc contribution activity we want to count that isn’t currently logged somewhere

* If this is true, and these numbers are small, we can build a simple single place to log these cross-team that can feed into the dashboard numbers

* Adam to identify if this is needed, and implement

== Querying our data ==

We want to report on the Number of Active Contributors over time, along with Number of New Contributors in a given time.

The query will be:

* For date X, give me:

 

These will be logged in the aggregate datastore against:  

* a mofo team name (e.g. “OpenNews”)

What is or isn’t counted as contribution activity will be decided individually by each team.  

* '''Doing''' rather than talking about doing