Mod edit: Post split from original:
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,158855.0.htmlTim -
That was a far more productive post and much more the type of comments I would expect to hear from you. I appreciate that. This is a celebration; it's noteworthy and good for a community to find reasons to celebrate and to stay encouraged and keep working for the common good. I am extremely proud to be a member of the Joomla! community and I honestly believe that nearly everyone here is trying to do good for this world.
A milestone is also a good time to reflect and to think about where we are going. I sense that is your overall point that setting goals, objectives and metrics for measuring our progress will have more value for us as a community than "just getting big." If that is what you mean, I agree with you.
On the datasets, I want to make a couple of comments. Alexa does show declines in all three open source CMS's over the past three months, but Drupal and WP recovered far better and even showed growth in some categories. Joomla!'s reach declined more than 50% in four months; that's significant. In that time, we began migrating from forge.joomla.org to JoomlaCode.org, too, which weighs in a bit. And, although the value of Alexa is widely disputed, it still would be nice to be distributing Joomla! v 1.5 pretty soon to turn momentum around.
Now, using the Google Trends data (from my old blog), Joomla! still shows the same increasing trend lines today as it showed from February but Drupal and WP are now increasing more rapidly. Hard to say what "counting Joomla! Google searches" means - but, it gives indication of interest (or poor SMF search capabilities or both).
Wordpress completely dwarfs Joomla! and Drupal in Technorati mentions; and, yet, Drupal far out blogs Joomla!. Same is true with Diggs and delicious and Flickr. Joomla! still is not a community that is comfortable and active (in comparison) in the social networking environments. We need to work on that.
All of this is very interesting, but, like you are suggesting, metrics are really more valuable when these values are measurements towards goals we have agreed upon as a community. It gives a group of people common focus and helps define purpose, which in turn builds enthusiasm, which helps build contributions, which I think is kind of the point of pooling our resources to make available free software.
I would like to see an effort, maybe part of our new Foundation Group, to engage the community in setting objectives for our third year (which is coming up quickly!) then identifying metrics we can use to measure our progress and publish our datasets. For example, I would like to see the community more active. Well, who wouldn't? Now, how could we measure that? Well, if we increase our Joomla! User Groups, if we have more daily Technorati mentions, if there are more community members at conference events, etc., etc., whatever metrics we agree on, then we can say we are moving (or not moving) towards our goals. Then, the question becomes "How do we increase our JUGs?" and, we have common purpose, etc., etc.
Tim, if we do that as a community, I hope you join in. I think you'd be very helpful for that cause. Thanks for coming back and more clearly stating your points. It means a great deal that you did so.
Amy
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