On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 19:44, Mel Chua <m...@redhat.com> wrote: > So I mocked up a few things. My apologies for the color scheme. And then > I figured I'd ask folks if the displays I was first inspired to make > would actually be the most useful ones to track: > > http://mchua.fedorapeople.org/tos-scorecard/publications.png
I'm not sure that my colleague Dr. Jacobsen and I prefer grapes. We are fond of little languages. ;) > * I started drawing blanks at this point, and went "wait, no, SURELY > there must be a TON of valuable stuff to measure, the problems should be > narrowing it down!" Well... "valuable" w.r.t. measurement usually implies that you know what the question is. Collecting data without knowing the question is a problem. The spirit of your questions seem to be "what is the activity/pulse of this community?" If that's the question, then that might make it easier to think of what to measure. > semester of the class in a beautifully formatted report *and* a workable > data dump? Blog posts? Git commits? Mailing list statistical analysis? > Meeting log keyword search? Number of FOSS community members your > students reported engaging with each week? This is particularly Yes, yes, and yes. I think it would suck royally if it starts with code, and it could turn out to be an absolutely amazing project if it (1) starts with a user-centered focus and (2) has one or two people who own it with an iron fist. I have yet to see a truly beautiful, usable app come out of a community-driven process that values code over usability. (By throwing down the glove, I'm perfectly aware that 3,000 projects will be listed to prove me wrong.) That's a mini-rant. My apologies. I'm happy to be part of a conversation and/or design process if that were to happen. I do not believe, at this time, that I have the bandwidth to own such a project, though. > research gruntwork I can do for all of you for free. I figured I might > as well get used to it, I'm going to be a grad student soon. ;) If you genuinely thought that the study of FOSS communities was going to play a role in your dissertation work, then a dashboard-like project could be a very powerful way to get research data. However, you can likely pursue a dissertation with three case studies just as well as a firehose of incomprehensible commit logs... it all depends on your question. But, in the meantime, if you designed an amazing, best-of-breed, FOSS participation dashboard... yeah, I'd use it. :D Cheers, Matt _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
