⚡ Lightning Talk: Metrics, How To Measure What Is Going On In Your Community

The talk discusses the importance of using metrics to understand community growth and engagement, and how to consolidate data from various tools to create meaningful metrics.

• Avoid using vanity metrics and focus on daily, weekly, and monthly active users
• Consolidate data from various tools using integrations or tools like Zapier
• Group community members into categories like lurkers, newbies, contributors, and champions to understand their needs and track their progress
• Understand the phases of community growth and track impact as the community matures
• Anecdote: Using metrics to track successful onboarding of community members

The speaker emphasizes the importance of tracking successful onboarding of community members, which can be done by turning the number of installs into the number of successful onboarding members. This helps to understand the effectiveness of onboarding strategies and identify areas for improvement.

The social structure of an Open Source project can be quite complex, and as the project grows it only becomes more complex over time. Understanding the reason members are joining your community, and why members choose to stick around is key to having the exponential growth your project deserves. Let's take some time to dive into some of the basic ways to start gathering the right metrics. To start how do you define a community member? With this definition, we can pinpoint the minimum requirements to be a community member and start to track this as part of the onboarding flow. As we follow the community journey, the next thing we want to measure is engagement. How has this user interacted with the other members and have they utilized any community resources? Do we know which of these activities result in the highest likelihood of them contributing in a meaningful way? You can probably tell by now, that just by having the right data you can start to nudge members on their way to being your community superstars, and catch some users before they fall out of the community funnel altogether. So join this talk to learn what is going on with your community and how you can make it even better.