Mark Leicester wrote:
On 11 May 2005, at 13:10, Ross Gardler wrote:
Mark Leicester wrote:
Hello everyone,
I've been looking at various statistical representations of community activity:
GMANE:
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.cocoon.devel
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.cocoon.user
Vadim:
http://people.apache.org/~vgritsenko/stats/projects/cocoon.html
Ken Coar:
http://people.apache.org/~coar/mlists.html#cocoon.apache.org
At a glance it seems the developers' list maintains a fairly steady flow of traffic. More worrying for me is the downward trend in the users' list. This is particularly noticeable in gmane's representation:
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.cocoon.user
At the risk of sounding like Chicken Licken (http://www.ongoing-tales.com/SERIALS/oldtime/FAIRYTALES/ chicklicken.html) I think that we ought to investigate this further and perhaps come up with some new strategies to arrest this fall. This may include interviewing the user list, asking our subscribers what they want, what they don't like, their level of expertise, etc.
Can it be shown that this downward trend is not a result of improving documentation?
That's certainly a possibility. If it's true then I suppose we can expect to see a corresponding increase in Wiki activity. I'll take a look at the docs list... Hmmm, the docs list (where Wiki changes are posted) has also dropped:
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.cocoon.documentation
Perhaps the only way we can test this is by asking these sorts of questions in a questionnaire. Would people like me to prepare a draft questionnaire for discussion?
Yes, that's an interesting idea, and would allow users to become more than just consumers, which is important for the health of the group.
It would be interesting for the questionnaire to include topics about technical, documentation and also community aspects.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://apache.org/~sylvain http://anyware-tech.com Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
