Here are some preliminary results from a look at the openplans.org data. I should say that the values are approximate, but I think they should be pretty close to the real values.
Here is what it all means:
mem active - the number of active members that logged in to the site during the previous 30 days
mem avg life - the average number of days a member is active (estimated from all members who are now dormant)
proj active - the number of active projects who have had their wiki edited during the previous 30 days
proj avg life - the average number of days a project is active (estimated from all projects who are now dormant)
ml active - the number of mailing lists which received a post to the archives during the previous 30 days
ml avg life - the average number of days a mailing list is active (estimated from all those that are now dormant)
One thing to note is the sharp drop in active members in November. This is perhaps, in part, due to a migration of members from openplans.org to nycstreets.org. Also, of all the data points, the December value is the one I trust the least due to the way things are approximated. In January I plan on doing a bit of work to verify the accuracy of these estimates.
The mailing list activity is higher than I expected. I checked and made sure that this isn’t due to spam (spam doesn’t actually make it into the archive.)
So this is just the start of what we can do to analyze our usage information to help us make good decisions about the evolution of our software. From here we can go on to analyze Task Tracker and WordPress usage.
This is really cool — thanks for posting this.
“One thing to note is the sharp drop in active members in November. This is perhaps, in part, due to a migration of members from openplans.org to nycstreets.org. Also, of all the data points, the December value is the one I trust the least due to the way things are approximated. In January I plan on doing a bit of work to verify the accuracy of these estimates.”
If I’m reading the graph correctly, it’s actually December that the drop occurs — in both October and, moreso, November there’s a fairly large *increase* in the number of members. (Could you post the raw data for this somewhere? I’d personally be more interested in seeing the derivatives of some of these measures, mem_active in particular. More fine-grained data would also be interesting for some of these.) So if you think the December data is untrustworthy, we might not be able to read too much into this.
Assuming it is correct, though, both the increases and the decrease approximately coincide, IIRC, with the period when we were making very rapid releases post-NUI and the current period when we stopped doing new releases altogether. It also coincides more or less with our increased frequency, and then decrease in turn, of *announcements* of new features on the front-page news section, which might have a lot more impact than just the steady rollout of “silent” features. (I’m using “frequency” a little broadly here, since in fact we made two posts in September, one in October, one in November, and none in December, but since the data is monthly too I think it’s a valid correlation.)
As for the nycstreets.org thing, we could determine that, right? Check how many accounts were active on each site, how many accounts use both, how many use nycstreets but not openplans, how many that existed on openplans starting using nycstreets and stopped using openplans; etc? Since member accounts are “linked” across sites, it shouldn’t be hard to get a rough sense of whether this is the case.
mem_active only counts a single member once, right? (That is, if I log in ten times in thirty days, it’ll only count me once.) I’d be curious to see how often members log in on average, too.
Finally, I think I mentioned this somewhere a few days ago somewhere, but it would be nice if we could filter out our own usage from these stats. I’m thinking in particular of mailing list stats; I strongly suspect that our internal use of Listen on the site skews the data pretty heavily — I already know that we’re just about the only people who use multiple mailing lists in a project, for example, and I’d bet a lot that our lists see a lot more activity than most.
Comment by ejucovy on December 21, 2007 at 6:37 pm