Courtney Robertson 6:34 pm on September 25, 2023

Request for Feedback: Make/Team Dashboards

Dashboards are more than just a collection of numbers and graphs; they are the pulse of a project. In the WordPress ecosystem, where collaboration and open-source principles guide us, dashboards can be a powerful team tool. Here’s why:

Improved visibility and communication: Dashboards can provide a centralized place for team members to view key metrics and data, such as the number of open and closed issues, the number of commits made, and the number of tests passed. This can help improve visibility and communication across the team and ensure everyone is aware of the progress. Additionally, this can show progress to those seeking opportunities to contribute where help is most needed.
Better decision-making: Dashboards can help teams make better decisions by giving them data-driven insights. This information can help them identify areas where they are doing well and where additional help is requested.
Increased transparency: Dashboards can help increase transparency within the team by clarifying what is being worked on and what progress is being made. This can help to build trust and collaboration.

Which teams will be involved?

While feedback from all teams is needed, Sustainability and MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. teams are vital to this success.

Open-source sustainability is a multifaceted concept beyond just keeping a project alive. It’s about creating an ecosystem where the software, the community that builds it, and the organizations that rely on it can thrive long-term.

The Sustainability Team can foster gathering information, identifying metrics, and partnering with the Meta Team on proposed tools to help us reach these goals.

Recap of progress thus far

Building stats dashboards is not a new idea; various contributor teams have considered the idea or have created proposals for the same in the past. Here’s a non-exhaustive summary of the work done so far.

In 2021, a kick-off post about dashboards reflecting team metrics was shared.
This was followed by the Community Team, which explored the idea of a team stats dashboard.
The Support Team also followed suit with its exploration of the dashboard idea
The topic emerged recently during WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe 2023, leading to the latest proposal in the Meta Team blog, reviving the idea.

Feedback requests: Your Voice Matters

Examples of how other various open-source projects measure the health of their organizations can be found at https://chaoss.community/kbtopic/all-metrics/.

Active contributors to WordPress:
- What metrics would you like to see on a team dashboard?
- How would you use a team dashboard?
- How do we help ourselves (and future contributors) determine the right metrics?
WordPress Team Reps:
- What metrics would be most helpful for you to track to represent your team effectively?
- What would help you make data-informed decisions or help you focus on your top priorities?
WordPress Project Leadership
- What metrics would you like to see on a team dashboard to help you make informed decisions about your project?
- How would you use this data?
Hosts, Plugins, Themes, SaaS, and Extender Ecosystem:
- What metrics and statistics would you like to see from teams throughout the WordPress Project?
- What data would help you support your customers?
- How would data help your organization contribute to WordPress?
- What data do you want to know regarding how your organization contributes?
Agencies from solo entrepreneurs through enterprise agencies (& their customers):
- What metrics would be most helpful for you to track to manage your team’s workload and deliver high-quality results to your clients?
- What metrics might your customers want to know?
- What data do you want to know or have visible regarding how you or your organization contributes?

Conclusion: The Community’s Role in Dashboard Success

Your feedback is not just welcomed; it’s essential.

Dashboards can be a cornerstone in the success of open-source projects like WordPress. They can help us be more transparent, make better decisions, and ultimately, create a more robust and inclusive community.

We invite you to leave your thoughts, suggestions, and insights in the comments below. Your voice can help shape the future of dashboards within the WordPress community.

Please share your feedback by: Wednesday October 11, 2023

The following people contributed to this post: @harishanker

Andy Fragen 6:45 pm on September 25, 2023
Comments move from SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C03JNV77Y57/p1695583182020429?thread_ts=1695409071.112679&channel=C03JNV77Y57&message_ts=1695583182.020429

**For dashboards:** For those of us who aren’t paid contributors I think several different metrics might be useful.
- Props and what team or component they belong to
- Which releases the user has received props
- Number of tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets contributed to and perhaps links to those tickets
- Number of PR/patches contributed
- Number of contributed PR/patches committed
- Number of PR/patches contributed to discussion, testing, improvement of PR
- Number of the above committed
- Number of forum questions & discussions participation
All of the above hopefully demonstrate how active the user is and how that activity translates into actionable contributions to coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. Yes, the above are mostly for code contributions. Additional metrics for translations, learn, support, etc would be good too.

Hopefully the above data would be able to give a gestalt of the value of the contributor so that maybe #core-committers and lead devs would more closely follow their activity.

Honestly, as a non-sponsored contributor I’ve had a difficult time engaging the attention of #core-committers without nagging. It can be a frustrating process that always contains the question, “Why am I spending so much of my time on something that leadership (yes I consider #core-committers leadership) doesn’t seem to be engaged with?”
- Gus Austin 1:12 am on September 26, 2023
  
  After realizing several of the outcomes and examples overlap with the Drupal contribution crediting system, I shared the following in the same Slack thread.
  
  This podcast (and show notes) provides a good bit of detail about the Drupal crediting system. It doesn’t cover the fact that Tim Lehnen (CTO of the Drupal Association) is part of an ongoing effort to extend the system by recognizing time based contributions (using 5ftF as inspiration).
  
  There are also several references to the Drupal crediting system in this summit discussion https://make.wordpress.org/summit/2023/09/15/community-summit-discussion-notes-increasing-contributor-recognition-and-celebration/
  
  Also should reference this brainstorm from the Open Collective/open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. community where there’s been some on/off discussion about collaborating and contributing to crediting systems in their http://slack.opencollective.com/ (where there are channels and several contributors from WordPress, Drupal, and thousands of other open source projects).
- Aurooba Ahmed 4:02 pm on October 11, 2023
  
  It seems to me that implementing some of these on a user level on people’s profile should be comparatively easier to accomplish – since the profiles already track when you respond to a tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket or open a PR on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/. That could be a start to introducing metrics in general, before going to the team level.
Courtney Robertson 6:50 pm on September 25, 2023

+make.wordpress.org/sustainability/
+make.wordpress.org/meta/
Blake Bertuccelli-Booth 11:40 pm on September 25, 2023

I would be curious how to integrate dashboards without pushing a wall of errors that discourages work (as we’ve seen with the wall of GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) errors). The best dashboards I’ve seen relate KPIs to people responsible for those KPIs. My question is: who would be responsible for those KPIs? I’m not sure the WP ecosystem works has (or should have) a clear product management pipeline.
Gus Austin 8:20 pm on September 26, 2023

Will this project overlap/compliment with goals/outcomes of the Refining Five for the Future community summit discussion?

Seems like it would have to considering Team reps need a more accurate/transparent way to gauge/increase team and contributor capacity than what the current system provides.
Benjamin Evans 6:29 am on September 27, 2023
As a team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. working on improving team processes and administration flows, I’d love to see data to evaluate whether a new idea improved the team’s effectiveness or not. So, yes! We should collect data, and having a dashboard to easily access that data would be great.

Andy’s list of points above are all great. Here are some more non-code data we could collect to see the general “health” of a team. (Depending on how a team communicates, some of these data points may provide more insight than others.)
- Number of folks who joined/left a team’s SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel.
- Number of folks who start, respond to, or reactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. to a Slack thread.
- Number of team blog subscribers.
- Number of folks who contribute to blog conversations (authors, commenters.)
- Number of folks active on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ (those who create, comment, or close issues.)
- Number of Help Scout tickets received, marked as spam, replied to, or closed.
- Number of folks who contributed to managing HelpScout
In an effort to recognize new contributors and onboard them better, it would be good if the dashboard could also show who did the following in the last month/quarter etc.
- Commented on Slack, GitHub, or team blog, for the first time.
- Started a conversation, opened an issue, or published a blog post, for the first time.
For the Training Team specifically, we’d want a dashboard that provides information about users (visitors) or Learn WordPress, too.
- Number of unique visitors
- Time spent on each page/content
- Completion rate and average progress of a course
- Average time to completion for a course
- How often course quizzes are retaken
- Completion rate and average progress of watching a video
- Number of times users return to a piece of content
I may come back with more ideas.
- Courtney Robertson 12:17 am on September 28, 2023
  
  I do have Google Analytics 4 insights from Learn to share. Video replays and duration are harder to get, as that’s WPTV + VideoPress there. I’ve asked some questions from Jetpack staff on that at WCUS, and areas related to Sensei Pro.
  
  I’d logged quite a few ideas when the very first dashboards topic came up regarding contributor activity for Training. https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2021/02/26/would-stats-dashboards-help-your-team/#comment-5091. I’d love to expand upon that. I could see contribution metrics, and Learn site metrics. These might live under a few interfaces.
Naoko Takano 9:10 am on September 27, 2023
I’ll leave my answers for “WordPress Team Reps” and “WordPress Project Leadership” here since I am thinking about the Five for the Future & overall contributor experience.

What metrics would you like to see on a team dashboard?
- The number of newly activated contributors
- Contributor retention/churn rate
- Progression to advanced roles within the project
These will help reps and leaders determine the health of the contributor community, which leads to sustained WordPress project development.

How would you use a team dashboard?
Sharing reports, tracking progress, and bringing awareness of the current state

How do we help ourselves (and future contributors) determine the right metrics?
We will need to focus on metrics that contribute to the main goals of “Democratizing WordPress (making it accessible and usable for many folks)” and regularly review these metrics for ongoing relevance and impact.
Steve Dufresne 12:28 am on October 5, 2023

Thanks for the post!
What metrics would be most helpful for you to track to represent your team effectively?

I think we should start here. Either we choose a metric that works for all teams (new contributors to channel, # of threads in channel, etc..), or all teams choose 1 specific metric. That’s something we could ship quickly. The risk is that we noodle too much on magical metrics that may not be possible or may not matter. If a team decides their chosen data point isn’t actually relevant, no worries, we can switch it out for another.
Courtney Robertson 4:08 pm on October 12, 2023
Moving Forward

Based upon the Recap of Progress, We have had feedback on these ideas over the past two years.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who took the time to share their insights on this post and earlier related discussions. Your invaluable input is the cornerstone that propels this project forward.

Metrics Presentation:
- Initially present a set of basic metrics considered universally beneficial across teams and simple to assess.
Working Groups Formation:

There are areas in which we would still like feedback to be gathered. As these parties haven’t offered feedback, we should start with the teams requesting it first. Later, we can form working groups to reach out to the non-contributor groups for additional feedback specifically.
- Form working groups inclusive of members from:
  - WordPress Project Leadership
  - Hosts, Plugins, Themes, SaaS, and Extender Ecosystem
  - Agencies ranging from solo entrepreneurs to enterprise agencies
- These groups can delve deeper into specialized metric needs, utilization strategies, and data interpretation methodologies tailored to their respective domains.
Collaborative Feedback Loops:
- Establish feedback loops between working groups and the broader community to refine metrics iteratively, ensuring they remain relevant and valuable.
Integration & Evaluation:
- Gradually integrate suggested metrics into the dashboards and evaluate their impact, ensuring they aid in making informed decisions, supporting customers, and contributing to WordPress effectively.

Comments are closed.

Directory

Which teams will be involved?

Recap of progress thus far

Feedback requests: Your Voice Matters

Conclusion: The Community’s Role in Dashboard Success

Share this: