CHAOSScast

Episode 45: Fireside Chat: Metrics Strategy with Daniel, Sean, and Venia

Oct 8, 2021

50:43

Hello and welcome to CHAOSScast Community podcast, where we share use cases and experiences with measuring open source community health. Elevating conversations about metrics, analytics, and software from the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software, or short CHAOSS Project, to wherever you like to listen. On today’s episode, we are discussing the pitfalls of metrics since there are a lot of things that can go wrong when implementing your metrics from getting over the feeling of being lost in the data. Also, we’ll be talking about a variety of different communities from very small all the way to larger ones. Daniel and Sean share some frameworks they have found work really well for building and deciding metrics, and how metrics are assessed to make sure whether or not they are still relevant. Download this episode now to find out much more, and don’t forget to subscribe for free to this podcast on your favorite podcast app and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues.

[00:02:43] The conversation starts by talking about what goes wrong when people start to build a lot of metrics, and what are some pitfalls or issues that we can maybe solve later.

[00:08:19] Daniel and Sean talk about the concept of commit and give a use case example.

[00:11:42] Venia brings up a common issue they tend to have following with gamification is not just the concerted effort to gamify the analytics and the stacks the second they become public and Daniel and Sean expand on that.

[00:17:55] Daniel and Sean share some frameworks that they have found work really well for building and deciding metrics, for building policies that ensure that those occur, and a good framework for benchmarking over time so that you can measure and change your metric strategy as you communities grow.

[00:23:00] The topic of goals is expanded on by Venia, and she talks about recognizing that sometimes simple is better and she mentions what goals you want to consider.

[00:28:25] We’re talking about the “M” in the GQM (goal, question, metric) process and Sean and Daniel give us their recommendations on how you go about based on one specific question, picking out a suite of metrics that might explain that, and if is there one specific key performance indicator and a few descriptors or if you just select three main metrics.

[00:33:21] Venia wonders how we navigate and start that conversation to wrap in the organizational aspects in the course of your metrics building journey.

[00:39:09] We learn how are metrics are checked to make sure that the metrics makes sense and the ways they are they assessed whether or not they are still relevant.

Adds (Picks) of the week:

[00:45:29] Daniel’s pick is a book called, The Culture Map, Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures by Erin Meyer.
[00:46:49] Sean’s pick is a book called, Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak by Travis Sawchik.
[00:48:54] Venia’s pick is building a small, intimate community of learning and creating her own information diet book club.

Panelists: