Metrics / Analytics

awesome - have added a few ideas on what to track.

I think the most important metrics to track are active users per week and also active groups per week. Ideally this would be displayed in a form where you can see % growth over period of time.

The other crucial figure is % engagement - every group should have a front and centre stat for what % of it's users engaged with loomio that week and admin should have a metric for the whole site.

I'm currently scheming on an extension which could plugin to active admin to do the active user stuff which would require minimal integration but would then be available for pretty much any other rails project out there and would love to see us build an engine others can use.

Feel like this could be good to work out in a RL meeting.

@Matthew - fair enough. Although Ross is overseas, so you'll have to find a time to skype with him. I think engaging in here is probably a good start though.

I am interested in measuring viral growth, how many people are added to a group after group is set up
How many people form a group start other groups

It's excellent we're looking at what we need to collect and I know it's what we're all already thinking anyway but while we're discussing it let's commit it to history:

We'll need a settings option to turn off tracking for an account or group specifically and to make sure users know that any information collected here is anonymously and exactly what it will be used for (improving the tool/community).

Obviously with public groups it's not going to be much of an issue but just want to make sure we're clear to users about what data we're collecting and why.

Just had a conversation with Josh. He mentioned that "active users" is probably a good first metric to start tracking. Also that we could probably do it using ActiveAdmin (which is what we're using for our current admin panel) and eventually turn it into a Rails gem that could be re-used in other projects.

I also mentioned that putting KISS inside an open-source application could feel a bit strange, so it probably makes sense to not use it for now unless anyone has strong feelings otherwise.

From the Enspiral Yammer:

http://railscasts.com/episodes/378-fnordmetric
FnordMetric is a ruby gem that allows you to chart events in real time. This is great for keeping track of user activity in your Rails app as demonstrated in this episode.

Looks worth investigating.

From yesterday's meeting, my understanding is that our immediate priority is to produce reliable information about engagement — to help understand what makes groups succeed or fail with the tool; and to see if the improvements the dev team are making (http://loom.io/discussions/962) are helping or hurting engagement.

This sounds like a really good place to start. Its a challenging problem to solve actually and is something that should evolve as the application evolves.

One metric that Simon mentioned for tracking engagement is number-of-group-members-that-visit-the-group / number-of-group-members. Could be on a daily basis.

Also, I'll have a look at that gem. Might be just what we need.