Today at Open Source Bridge, I’ll be leading a session about Open Source Community Metrics: Tips and Techniques for Measuring Participation at 3:45pm in B302.

Do you know what people are really doing in your open source project? The best thing about open source projects is that you have all of your community data in the public at your fingertips. You just need to know how to gather the data about your open source community so that you can hack it all together to get something interesting that you can really use. Having good community data and metrics for your open source project is a great way to understand what works and what needs improvement over time, and metrics can also be a nice way to highlight contributions from key project members. This session will focus on tips and techniques for collecting and analyzing metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects using examples from what I’ve learned doing MeeGo metrics.

A few topics:

• General guidance for coming up with a set of metrics that makes sense for your project.
• Tips and techniques for collecting metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects: Bugzilla, MediaWiki, Mailman, IRC and more.
• General approaches and technical details about using various data collection tools, like mlstats.
• Techniques for sharing this data with your community and highlighting contributions from key community members.

For anyone who loves playing with data as much as I do, metrics can be a fun way to see what your community members are really doing in your open source project. It’s like people watching, but with data.