{"id":533,"date":"2012-07-16T09:55:37","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T14:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/?p=533"},"modified":"2012-07-15T22:28:47","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T03:28:47","slug":"defining-community-health-at-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/2012\/07\/16\/defining-community-health-at-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining community health at scale"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was at the Community Leadership Summit<\/a> over the weekend, and this is part of a series of posts following up on some of the topics I felt were most important.<\/p>\n

The community manager for Google Chrome, Jacky Hayward, ran a discussion session at CLS to ask how you can even determine the health of a community when it’s got hundreds of thousands or even millions of members. Clearly this is a tricky problem, and it seems that none of the community managers in attendance had a really great solution to this.<\/p>\n

I proposed taking a similar approach that Stephen’s done a fantastic job using here at RedMonk —\u00a0quantitative research by data mining<\/a>\u00a0— but in this case doing so on specific project communities rather than general development forums.<\/strong> Imagine taking IRC logs, mailing-list archives, web forums, or whatever a community has, then tracking activity and sentiment over time. An ideal way to do so might be repurposing system-monitoring software to import community data and track it, set alerts for problems, etc.<\/p>\n

A major difficulty that came up in measuring health was getting data on the lurkers — the people who rarely or never participate actively, but just come to learn something or fix a problem.\u00a0One attendee noted that it’s very hard to tell how introverts are engaging with your content and if they’re even having a positive experience.\u00a0Another attendee followed up brilliantly that when trying to get at this information,\u00a0you’re measuring the health of your knowledge base, not the health of your community<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I would posit that what the lurkers are doing is not related to your community at all, and they should be ignored in this context — beyond discussions of how to pull them further down the\u00a0funnel<\/a>\u00a0to become participants.\u00a0All users are not community members; some of them are just users<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Another topic that came up was basically data versus stories. As you probably know if you’re reading this post, given the title of the blog (The Story of Data), I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. Especially in the context of community management, we need to remember that\u00a0data are not the primary goal; the goal is to learn more about the people in your community, and data merely inform your decision-making.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I was at the Community Leadership Summit over the weekend, and this is part of a series of posts following up on some of the topics I felt were most important. The community manager for Google Chrome, Jacky Hayward, ran a discussion session at CLS to ask how you can even determine the health of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-data-science","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p23Tsn-8B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/dberkholz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}