New Metric Idea: Advocacy/Outreach

[divya-mohan0209]

Metric basics

• Metric title: Advocacy/Outreach
• Metric summary (1-2 sentences): Advocacy and outreach initiatives are important non-code contributions toward helping spread awareness about the project. Not only do they help engage potential contributors to open source, but they also significantly help with the adoption/use of the project contributing to the health and sustainability of the community.
• Why should this metric model be created? (1-2 sentences): Although this is partially covered under Types of Contributions and Community Awareness, advocacy efforts (and their effectiveness) aren't measured in yet AFAIK. It's a quintessential chicken-and-egg problem. Since we don't know what to measure, there is a need for indicators to define contextual progress with respect to the efforts employed, and there are very few formalised/streamlined programs within projects championing advocacy efforts. Not only are these efforts fragmented, but they are also heavily reliant on the bandwidth of maintainers/leaders of the project, who can't measure/sponsor these efforts without proper indicators of success.

Data collection and measurement

Are there existing tools that could collect this data? If yes, list them:

• To the best of my knowledge, I don't think there's a single tool to help collect this data across projects because of the aforementioned chicken-and-egg problem. Also, this is highly specific data since advocates are typically tied to a particular ecosystem/project. Some examples of programs that do this are the New Contributor Workshops within the Kubernetes and Drupal projects. There's also the CNCF Ambassadors program tied to the CNCF ecosystem at large but is very much dependent on external content creators (currently) rather than contributors for outreach and advocacy.

If this metric involves a lot of raw data, what filters would you use to narrow down the metric? If applicable, describe ways to filter the data into smaller segments:

• Much of the current advocacy/outreach is tied to cosmetic metrics like engagement on social media, number of pieces of content created, and GitHub stars, i.e., the output of the effort. While this is one way to measure progress, in my opinion, advocacy/outreach programs could correlate this data with process-related and outcome-related data to improve measurement. Filters are provided below, some of which tie into existing metrics.
  • Is there an existing program/initiative for advocacy/outreach? IMO, this would be explicitly documented if the case.
  • Conversion rate of the program from disinterested/passive - active contributor
  • Number of new contributors
  • Engaged advocates
  • Churn rate of program members. This would help us understand if the ecosystem/project, in general, is tanking in terms of general audience perception & confidence. While making way for fresh blood in a couple of years is acceptable, a sudden dip could indicate a wider problem.

How would you visualize this metric? If you have an idea on how this metric should be visualized or displayed so it makes the most sense to a viewer, describe that here:

About you

• Are you interested in authoring this metric together with the Working Group?: yes
• Have you attended a CHAOSS Working Group meeting before?: no
• If not, would you consider joining one to discuss your metric idea?: yes
  Edit: * Anything else you would like us to know?: IMO, this should be a metric model as opposed to a metric since it does tie into other metrics already existing within CHAOSS. However, I didn't find a way to suggest a metric model so I've used this template & I'm happy to open another one, if this is insufficient.

I think there might be duplication with some of the efforts undertaken by wg-app-development for the Promotions & Communications persona. However, having a broader program-based metric/metric model talking about efforts would help IMO.

[eyehwan]

I have interests on this metric model. But I am not sure if we should discuss it first in metrics models wg or common wg? @germonprez @sgoggins

[ElizabethN]

@divya-mohan0209 @eyehwan Hi! I was just doing a little repo cleanup today and I was curious if this was still a topic of interest that should be brought to the metrics models group?