Hayden, Katherine M. wrote:
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.
I think data is obviously one great way to expand -- another way to
expand is in terms of new visualizations that can be produced. Namely,
making it possible to compare projects on the same graphs (or, well,
actually having graphs again now that we've moved away from Google
Chart), and providing new ways to access all of the data at a glance. If
you're interested in doing this, I don't see a problem with you either
focusing on data collection, visualizations ("the grapher"), or a little
of both.
So, if you want to think about visualization ideas, those too, would be
useful.
I think you'll find there are a lot of different places we can take this.
--Michael
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
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