Creating a dashboard for measuring developer evangelism impact
purevirtual.euThis seems like a very hot topic in the community, but no one has really figured out how to measure things out side of click through to signup. The magic of evangelism is in creating real connections with people, helping solve problems, and encouraging creativity. I don't see a way that can be measured, and frankly, I don't even know if it should be.
I completely agree that the magic exists in the real, genuine human connections, the satisfaction and impact of selflessly helping others, and the act of inspiring someone to further reach toward their full creative potential. (see: http://timgrid.com/fuck-leads-generate-relationships/)
After five years of doing the community/evangelism thing, and much resistance to tracking/measuring my/our team's activities, I'm finally /gradually coming around to appreciating the concept of collecting data and performing analytics on community efforts.
The key, IMHO, is to focus on metrics that really matter, as opposed to devoting resources to surfacing meaningless ("vanity") numbers for the sake of having numbers. (see: video of a talk I gave on this topic here: http://devguild.heavybit.com/developer-evangelism/)
I believe that it's up to us to figure out how to measure the impact we have as evangelists/community professionals, because other people (coworkers, investors, partners, etc) will always demand some insight. And if we don't figure it out for ourselves, they'll try to figure it out for us (and, logically, we're better positioned in this regard than those who don't spend their time doing this stuff.)
So, in light of that, we're catalyzing a collaborative project to help figure it out together: https://github.com/keen/dashboards-dot-community.
Since we'd been working on the concept presented in the Github repo linked above, I was super excited to find Jonas's project (hence my share here on HN.)
I'd love to continue the conversation! @panbanda, maybe you'll join us on Github to provide your additional perspective?