Hi Michael, Max and Karsten,
I've read through this mailing list and spoken with Yaakov on IRC already about
contributing to this project over the summer.
We went through some basic interview questions and left off with this request from
Yaakov:
"The application itself, as you've read on the wiki, is going to look
for original analysis ideas. Last summer, i tried to get a student for
another data analysis project to contribute, but that failed. I had
asked him to put together a few mockups, and the only code i received
in the end was a CSS stylesheet that matched the mockups. Instead, i
would like you to focus on the the following.
What kind of data is important for us to be looking at. You're going
to collect data from mailing lists, wikis, version control systems,
message boards, irc channels, and other possible sources of input.
What kind of data is important and what is chaff?"
These are my thoughts on the above.
From reading through the EKG mailing list archives, it seems that
everyone agrees that EKG's focus is, as Michael put it:
1) To learn about projects people are interested in and have strong communities around
2) To learn which projects could use more help on the community side and to point to other
projects they could look to as examples
To look for projects that have strong communities we have to decide how we evaluate a
community and decide whether it's strong or not. Is that defined by having a lot of
members on the mailing list? What if 75% of the mailing list members never contribute? Or
maybe it's the frequency of a project's discussion on IRC. Or the amount of
quality documentation?
Here are some data I think are work collecting:
Breakdown of members
Mailing lists:
Number of posts (on it's own and/or discounted by number of members)
Average time between an original post and a follow-up post
Average number of times a user posts. Also the ranges: most and least posts by a user.
Could do box plots
Number of joins/leaves in a month (or whatever greater time slice you select)
And what's already incorporated:
Total number of members
Members by email
IRC:
A graph of the number of users on over a 24 hour period
Average number of users on at any given time
Length of time a user spends on channel for a given session
If we didn't mind keeping track of users:
Length of time a user spends on channel in a month (or whatever greater time slice you
select)
The frequency of new users
Number of posts (posts might be the wrong terminology here, would ims be better?)
Average time between an original post and a follow-up post
Average number of times a user posts. Also the ranges: most and least posts by a user.
Could do box plots
Version control systems:
Number of commits
Time since last commit
Wikis:
Number of page visits
Length of average visit
Number of wiki edits
Message boards:
Number of threads, replies, views
What are your critiques/feedback? Is that what you were looking for Yaakov?
Kasia
Katherine "Kasia" Hayden
Bennington College, Class of 2011
312.576.8175
khayden(a)bennington.edu