I Have the Data, So How Can I Tell If My Community Sucks?

The OSAS team in Red Hat has started thinking about using metrics more regularly to measure the health and activity levels of projects and their attendant communities. But the problem is not the data, it's figuring out what we need from the data.

If you ask yourself "what makes my community healthy?" you may soon discover that the question is not so easily answered. Contribution levels, downloads, user interactions... these all sound good, but do they always answer the community health question? Depending on where a community is in its lifecycle, they may not. And, complicating the matter is that different projects have completely different end goals--more users vs. more contributors, for example,

In this presentation, Brian Proffitt examines the questions that need to be asked in order to determine the answers for community health.