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Raleigh, NC
Rikki Endsley is the Developer Program managing editor at Red Hat, and a former community architect and editor for Opensource.com. In the past, she worked as the community evangelist on the Open Source and Standards (OSAS) team at Red Hat; a freelance tech journalist; community manager for the USENIX Association; associate publisher of Linux Pro Magazine, ADMIN, and Ubuntu User; and as the managing editor of Sys Admin magazine and UnixReview.com. Follow her on Twitter at: @rikkiends.
Authored Comments
I *love* seeing all these great suggestions. I used to us Clementine, but these days I don't listen to much music on my Linux laptop. I'm keeping an eye on the series and maybe I'll try out a few new players.
Hi Brendan,
Thanks for your feedback. I assume you're talking about the writers email list? In any case, you make a valid point, and one that the Opensource.com editorial team discusses often. In fact, our team recently watched video from an internal training James gave on community metrics, which is why we reached out to him and asked if he'd write up a series for us. We're interested in improving how we gather and share metrics, and readers can learn along with us (Thanks, James!)
I'm a huge fan of qualitative analysis, which is much harder to report when it comes to the health of communities and publications. Quantitative analysis shows us which articles readers clicked on, but doesn't tell the whole story. Did they read it because they like that topic/author/headline? Was the article a great resource other publications were able to reference? Did it create conversation on our site (comments), or did it lead to an interesting debate on another site/community/list?
Did an article that had 400 views in a month inspire a company/school/organization to adopt an open source tool? If so, I'd call that a huge success story...but we might never hear about it, and we certainly can't get reports that collect this kind of data. Did an article that had a few hundred page views bring much-need attention to an open source project/community/event that otherwise would have flown below the radar? Again, a successful article (in my humblest of opinions).
Quantitative analysis is easier to get and report, but often qualitative is much more useful. (In fact, I brought this topic up in a journalist round table I participated in earlier this week: https://youtu.be/1sTHTdLaSjM)
If you have other ideas for how we can improve our reporting for writers and readers, feel free to send suggestions to the editorial team at open@opensource.com or to me directly at rikki@opensource.com.