Joomla! Community Dashboard launched

[RCheesley]

Please use this forum thread to discuss the blog post: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/commu ... nched.html

[brian]

Why do we have this when we already have better and more accurate information that gives a real value to all contributors on the issue tracker. Massive thumbs down from me as it devalues and ignores the majority of community members.

[crystalenka]

I'm curious as well. I asked this on twitter, but will this expand to provide more information at some point besides github stats? At the moment I think it's filling more the role of a "developers" dashboard than a "community" dashboard.

Will there be integration with the volunteers portal? Or the issue tracker? If not, if this is all it's planned to be, then....? I'm not sure. I feel like those who are looking for this information can see it just as easily on Github directly, and the people who are looking for this will be more likely to go there anyway, or to the issues tracker as Brian said.

Would love to know more of the thoughts behind how and why this dashboard came about and what it's purpose was originally intended to be, because maybe I'm misreading.

[brian]

As you obviously dont know or you presumably wouldn't be reinventing the wheel and giving a commercial company free advertising at the same time. Here are the current code contribution statistics https://issues.joomla.org/activity/user/joomla-cms which includes all contributions eg reports, tests, comments and fixes not just the limited set that the commercial company is offering.

(oh and it manages to spell my name correctly )

[RCheesley]

Thanks to you both for the feedback, it's much appreciated.

Indeed the issue tracker is an invaluable source of information, however my understanding is that it will only show information from Github, and at present only related to the CMS. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong here. The stats do show information from the issue tracker system such as testing which I don't believe is available via Github however I am not well versed in the technicalities here.

As a bit of background, the Dashboard pulls in from multiple repositories, including the Framework and some historical sources which are no longer used, to give an 'all time' overview. You can view the data sources that are being imported here: https://dashboard.joomla.org/its-repos.html.

The Dashboard is not only focused on code, it also pulls in information from our Documentation project, which you can view here: https://dashboard.joomla.org/wiki.html. This gives a nice overview of contributors to docs.joomla.org over time, and allows the community to see different areas of contribution. It's entirely feasible we could pull in information from the volunteers portal, glip etc providing that the data sets are accessible and can be imported in an appropriate format.

There is also the potential of including further data sources such as the forums and mailing lists, however these were not supported 'out of the box' and would require further development from us to implement, as well as some logistical considerations - for example the sheer size of the data dumps which would come from the forum. When we were planning the dashboard we had discussions with the forum representatives on CLT about how this might be achieved but it was felt at the time it would not be feasible.

We also flagged that the Github imports don't show test information in the way that our project works, and that was something that would be very beneficial to be displayed alongside all the various metrics that are currently being presented. This could feasibly come in from the issue tracker if the information can be exposed in such a way that it can be imported by the tools that are being used. Again this side of things is a bit beyond my personal level of technical knowledge but I would really appreciate a discussion about how that could be achieved, as I agree with you Brian that this information is just as relevant as issues being submitted, commits being merged and PR's being made.

The dashboard in its present form is showing only a small subset of visualisation options as a starting point. The metrics we are displaying were agreed by the leadership teams during our joint summit as a useful dataset from which we could start, the idea being that we can iteratively add more metrics based on what the community feels would be helpful to know. If there are specific metrics that are of interest we can look at adding those to the dashboard at any point in the future providing of course that the data sources exist.

It would be great to have feedback on what metrics you feel would be helpful to be displayed, and what data sources could be imported. If you'd like to help with contributing then that would also be really great!

Thanks again for taking the time to respond!

Ruth

[brian]

We already have all the metrics from the issue tracker on the link I published above

We also already have the data from the wiki https://developer.joomla.org/wiki-activity.html

I am certainly not going to tell a commercial company how to access the data that they seem not to be able to access themselves in their commercial product but the code is open source so its not hard

[deleted user]

In all fairness, the data that the issue tracker offers that cannot be extrapolated from GitHub comes from the tracker's test "module". All of the events that factor into the tracker's "tracker points" on the charts is related to GitHub activity (see https://github.com/joomla/jissues/blob/ ... l.sql#L237 for the database schema which defines the activity types).

With regard to GitHub activity as a whole, the commercial company's data does not encapsulate all active projects (it includes the CMS and Framework repositories, but does not include other projects such as the issue tracker, patch tester component, install from web plugin, statistics server, or the weblinks package). Likewise, the issue tracker does not support all of Joomla's code repositories on GitHub. So even the statistics that are made available on the tracker (for which the coverage is "best" for the CMS repo, where the activity is the greatest) are only a subset of the overall project activity. Also, the commercial company's offering supports aggregated data for all repositories, something not supported with the issue tracker's statistics.

Also, in all fairness to the commercial company, the data their dashboard offers on the Wiki activity is more comprehensive than that single chart on the Developer Network. I'm not familiar with the API offerings of a MediaWiki instance so I don't know if the way they are making that data available is by storing data snapshots or if it is data collectively available by way of an API. If it is available by an API, the chart on the Developer Network can be enhanced to offer filters similar to the activity charts on the issue tracker.

Personally, I don't want to get into a spat over whether all data metrics are developed "in house" or whether a commercial company supports them. Frankly, those companies are going to have more time to develop the solutions we desire versus community member volunteer hours (there's a reason the charts pull request on the issue tracker is a year and a half old). With that said, as far as the code activity goes, IMO this dashboard does NOT offer anything of substantive value over the metrics on each GitHub repository or through the project's Open Hub registrations (https://www.openhub.net/p/joomla for the CMS, https://www.openhub.net/p/joomla-framework for the Framework, and https://www.openhub.net/p/joomla-issue-tracker for the issue tracker; again note this isn't all encompassing) beyond the ability to show aggregated data.

While the idea of a numbers dashboard might be appealing to some, IMO unless it can accurately represent ALL activity ongoing in the community then it's not going to paint an accurate picture and will display a heavy bias towards metrics that are already publicly accessible in other locations.