James Falkner

342 points

Orlando

Technology evangelist, teacher, learner, author, dedicated to open source and open computing. I work at Red Hat as a technical evangelist for Red Hat's portfolio of open source products and love what we do and learning from others, and occasionally teaching at conferences.

Prior to Red Hat I spent 5 years at Liferay growing a large open source community, onboarding new contributors, meeting and engaging with beginners and experts, and championing open source as the de facto choice for businesses large and small. I am based in the Orlando, Florida, USA area.

Open Minded Author Contributor Club

Authored Content

How a lifecycle management tool uses metrics

Foreman is a lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers.

4 questions to answer when choosing community metrics to measure

When evaluating a specific metric that you are considering including in your metrics plan, you should answer four questions.

Tools for collecting and analyzing community metrics

Thus far, we've discussed the importance of setting goals to guide the metrics process, avoiding vanity metrics, and outlined the general types of metrics that are useful for…

Using metrics effectively in OpenStack development

The OpenStack Foundation Ecosystem Technical Lead, Ildikó Váncsa, explains how OpenStack metrics can be used in software development processes.

sticky notes making a palm tree on an island

Choosing the right metrics for your project

Last month we discussed setting goals for your community metrics program. These goals serve as a constant reminder of what you want to achieve in the program and should be…

How to measure your community's health

How do you measure the health of your community, identify problems, and track progress towards your goals? What should you be measuring? Last month we discussed vanity metrics…

Authored Comments

James Falkner

27 Jul 2016

Why you should avoid vanity metrics and measure what matters

Time on site, bounce rate, repeat visitors, "fallen angels" (those that used to visit and have disappeared), engagement tracking (are your readers moving from "wallflowers" to "core reader" to "engaging commentator" to "author"? how many moved up? how many moved down?). These are a bit closer to the goals of opensource.com, which is to "create a connection point for conversations about the broader impact that open source can have—and is having—even beyond the software world". Ideally you could trace open source adoption back to patient 0 - the article that someone from the organization read and inspired them - but that's incredibly difficult (and usually approximated with regular surveys of readers). So you try to get as close to ideal as possible, with the resources you have. It's more difficult than just looking at google analytics, for sure.. but in my opinion, finding a better set of metrics lets you escape the ad trap and forces you to focus on achieving your goals. I'm getting ahead of myself now :)