sure, what do you need?, I can work on this after 1 november! 
Yap. I can help to set it up and do rest other things.
So at first we need a VM or server where we can host our Own Piwik. We can also have a subdomain like piwik.mozilla-community.org. Then need to know which website we should impliment. Discuss with the Webmaster!
First thing would be to make a PRD (Product Requirements Doc). We need to do a better job of justifying why we’re taking on a project. Confluence has a really good template for writing PRDs.
I’ve copied the template into a Google doc so it’s easier to collaborate on.
We’ve started filling in the PRD so that it’s a bit more obvious what should go in it.
However, we really need to get an idea of what the goals are for communities. Why do communities need analytics, what will they actually use them to do?
Hi,
In my opinion, it’s going to be easier to create several scenarios where we could define the different metrics a community could be interested in. Every community is going to be in its own moment, in which it would have different needs, depending on its goals, size & areas, age, resources, contents, …
In general, I think that we could say that communities have 2 goals in their websites. 1) getting contributors and 2) promote their activities and their contents. Depending on the status of the community, one of these goals can be priorized.
For example, a just born community possibly needs to focus on knowing how their website perform in order to get people, how many users land in their contribute page and how many of these are really interested in contributing. It would be also interesting to know what’s the navigation flow, or the time users are spending in different pages or contents related to participation. This would help the community to know what tasks/projects/areas are more interesting and engaging to their audiences.
In a more developed community, with more contributors, structure and more mature, I think that focus is different. In the case of Mozilla Hispano, the questions we try to answer with Piwik are:
General: goal here is to know how is the impact we’re having. Reach.
- What’s the global amount of traffic in our website? And its
evolution through time? - In which hours are we receiving more visitors? And its evolution through time?
- Which are the sources of our visits?
- Which words people are searching to make them land in our website?
- Who are the references that are sending us users?
Contents: goal here is to offer what users are interested in. Loyalty & Engagement.
- Which areas are most visited? And its evolution through time?
- How much time are users spending in our website? And its evolution
through time? - What documentation is more consulted? And its evolution through time?
- What articles are the most read, shared and commented?
SM atributtion: goal here is to know how our social media comm is working. Promotion.
- How many users come from our social networks messages? And its evolution through time?
- How much does every social network contribute? And its evolution through time?
I hope this helps as a starting point to complete that PRD. Ideally, I would encourage you to think about 2, 3, 4 community possible moments/goals. I just listed two, but I can guess that there’s more. From that, to create a list of questions and metrics will be easy. Then, the product (Piwik) will serve as a tool to answer those questions and guide the community in its road.
Best,
Berni
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I was thinking about this last night, and I think that perhaps a first good goal for using analytics would be to see what community sites are actually doing well, and what they’re not.
As part of our efforts to improve Community Sites, it’s on our radar to better define the roles of community sites, and also to establish an MVP (minimum viable product) either for new communities, or communities who are struggling with resources to keep a site going.
Putting analytics on as many community sites as possible just to understand how sites are performing would be very valuable to understanding what the goals of a community site should be.
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Not really, we need someone to drive it, or it has to wait until the
current contributors have time. You interested?
Yap. I am interested. Can you guide what to do next?
Sure, so first of all, “driving” something doesn’t necessarily mean having the answers. It means making sure the questions get asked, and prodding for responses if the discussion stalls. It’s also not necessarily doing the work but finding out what work needs to be done and matching it to someone who can do it.
So the step we’re on is making sure the PRD looks good. Part of that is figuring out the hardware requirements. It’s also figuring out the MVP (minimum viable product) or “pilot”, what’s the least thing that we can do that will be useful, that we should do first? What data should we gather, for what purpose?
I think most of us on the team would be responsive to an @mention with ideas towards specific questions. We just don’t have the time to remember to ask them, and to work the answers into a plan. @yousef and @tanner can help you with technical implementation questions.
I recommend adding a CDN for serving the piwik installation javascript.
Coming into this discussion late but with a dissenting opinion!
I think that for the moment, Google Analytics makes more sense for measuring information from community sites for the following reasons:
- The majority of community sites are already using GA very effectively (Slovenia, Czech, German, Italian, Japan, Turkey and Taiwan)
- In GA you have the opportunity to see all of the accounts you have view-rights on in one place which makes it much easier to run cross-site reports and identify long-term trends.
- Mozilla internally uses GA on all of it’s sites so as we push to get the immense value of these community sites more recognized, having it in a consistent format only makes it easier and lets us have metrics teams get involved and support data analysis.
- If people are concerned that we use GA because Google is seen as untrustworthy, all of our emails, docs, spreadsheets being google would seem like a more pressing issue. Non?
Let me know what you think!
Lucy
And it is. I think using Google Analytics for our sites is a terrible mistake, we shouldn’t encourage communities to use it.
Sorry for being bold but Piwik can provide same information without giving our data to Google and we can have all sites in one single place where while we own the data.
PS: MoCo is using the enterprise version of Google Apps which is supposed to have different terms on data retention and privacy. That was the argument of the people who decided that change for MoCo (which I don’t personally share).
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You’re very welcome to chime in here, and now is a good time as @tad and I are getting set up to renew efforts towards community sites.
GA is an option and it comes with the Google Apps that communities already use if they have email through us. I agree that being able to see trends across communities is valuable.
I do not think the majority of sites use analytics at all though. Piwik gives us a chance to teach important skills that a 3rd party hosted solution does not. The Mozilla internal teams have more than enough work to go around and so farming out what can be offloaded makes sense. Good tools should allow us to grab the same stats, so we should still be able to compare the numbers. I would hope that the metrics teams would be able to help us out no matter what tool a community decides to use.
I have come around to the belief that we have so many communities with different needs that we need to be prepared for a diversity of tools for similar tasks. If for no other reason than better tools come along, the existing tools don’t always stay at the top of the class, and some communities will switch to them sooner than others, while established communities keep to the old tools as they’re ingrained.
You raise very good points, and GA is available to communities if they like. I think what we need more than to pick a tool is to learn what sort of data we should be collecting and making sure to collect it in a way that can be compared tool agnostic - that way the data is always useful even if communities start with Piwik and choose to move to Google, or vice versa.
Hey @Kensie! I definitely agree that no matter what we decide, communities will find the tools that are right for them, and that we’re always going to have a plethora of tools.
Looking at the kinds of things we’d like to collect right now I’m focusing on getting some really basic data. I’ve been trying to find out:
- Average monthly average visitors to community sites over the past year
- What the majority of the people are using those sites for
- Which sites have local blogs and how those blogs are used (disseminate local info, share Mozilla news, promotion etc.).
As a starting point.
Lucy
This is stuff we’ve already been thinking about. I sent an email so we can catch up!
Also people will want to go to the new Mozilla Communities Web Services category. If you have a site that has services provided by Mozilla, then you should watch the category. This is the central communication channel for providing these services. We made the new category as we provide more services than just ops and because Community Ops works on things besides community sites.
I won’t move this topic for now because offering Piwik specifically would be an ops choice, but perhaps we should start a new topic about analytics for communities, and the data side, over there.
What the status of this request?
Some people expressed their interested and also volunteered to help maintaining the instance.