Objective

To provide all TOPP employees with an up-to-date answer to the question: What impact are we having on the world?  This will inform us on our progress in our mission.  It will both inspire us and keep our work grounded and oriented towards real world applications.

First Issue

Sent to topp-employees list.

Questions and Ideas for the Future

This newsletter could really be the public face on a more thorough and extensive analysis of company performance.  What tools should we use for this: Excel, Google Spreadsheets?  In addition to the ones already presented, what statistics should we track, that is, what statistics measure the success and general health of our company?  Some ideas:
* third-party comments/reviews of our sites
* instead of counting number of OpenPlans projects, we should really be counting "active projects," that is, any project that has been touched in the last week
* project "stickiness," or the half-life of projects--how long projects stay "active"
* mailing list "stickiness," or how long mailing lists stay active
* task tracker list "stickiness," or how long task lists stay active
* member "stickiness," how long members stay active
* site usage distribution, or, what proportion of traffic is spent using task tracker, the wiki, project/member management, listen, search
* task tracker real-world tasks being tracked and completed
* the proportion of usage by anonymous users

Do we want to publish this more thorough analysis publicly?  To what degree can we automate this?  Is automation important?

Ideas from TA

* report on our inputs, resources, number, quality, condition, as well as the outputs: customer focus (what), work process improvement (how),  measurement, supportive work environment
* how do we measure customer satisfaction?
* if we weren't doing what we are doing today (building openplans) would we start doing it