 In the program it kind of suggests that this is a talk about metrics like stuff for the LibraGraphics community. I realized that when you hear that you're thinking yeah this is the first day, it's morning, there was no coffee, what I really want to hear about is statistics. Luckily for you I'm not actually gonna do that. The reason being that statistics are not very interesting including these statistics, the numbers to maybe provide a better explanation, the actual numbers themselves are not very revelatory. Fortunately I figured out while I was gathering them and even more fortunately along the way of gathering the numbers I ran into some interesting things and those are probably worth talking about whereas the actual numbers are not going to tell you a whole lot. I do actually have the numbers and graphs and things and we can look at those if you want to be ashamed to not look at them at all but to provide a little bit of background before we see the numbers I got started thinking about how the community of users and developers works because I'm really fascinated by 80-20 functions which is a sort of a slang term I don't know how accurate it ever really is but there's a lot of those 80% of the bugs are reported by 20% of the users 20% of the features take 80% of the time a lot of things like that and there's sort of this feeling you hear from people every now and then that Libra graphics is sort of like that with LGM that it seems like most of the stuff most of the talking back and forth between projects in between users and developers happens in the months leading up to LGM and like right afterwards and I was curious if that's actually true if that's just the it feels because you're so excited about being here you're working on your slides late at night and all that sort of thing so to tell whether or not that was true I decided I had to like actually figure out what the community looked like and that meant gathering a bunch of numbers which as you'll see don't tell you a whole lot this is the number of people registered on all of the web forums that I could find I'm gonna scoot over here and see if are any of those project names visible we can read them there it's not every project out there because this this first slide is just looking at the typical web-based discussion forum where you create an account and it's all in the browser and ultimately I don't think that this number matters I mean if you look the gigantic when there's blender which is 192,667 registered users does that number tell you anything no it doesn't that doesn't really reveal much to me but it is interesting on a metal level to look at how big the disparity is you'll see disparity in all of these things so why is it that blender and GIMP are so much bigger in terms of registered forum users than other projects that's a real question what the actual numbers are not similarly I looked at things like Facebook which as you'll see that's magic lantern which is a camera firmware projects just off the chart crazy I mean literally almost off the chart but you'll also notice that there's a little more even distribution there and I think that that's really because the interaction model of Facebook is so different right anybody you can create a page you don't have to do a whole lot to participate in that sense you just click the like button Twitter again really different interaction model it's broadcast it's not necessarily a conversation so following someone on Twitter doesn't have the same significance again magic lander wacky high the thing here is that the what you count is following something on Twitter is really hard to pin down because like blender again the first column over there there's an official blender foundation accounts that you can follow but a lot of others there's not like the GIMP one there that's actually a composite of like several GIMP forums and I don't know what that tells you Google plus finally magic lantern meets its match on Google plus and again is the one off the chart there but again the wrong numbers don't don't tell you a whole lot the last the last of these graphs that I'm gonna show you subscribers to users mailing lists there's a lot of empty spaces there because in addition to not mattering in general this is a really late addition and so I was emailing people on my way here on Sunday and I don't have responses from everyone if you're working on one of these projects that there's a blank slot there that means that I found that you have an official users mailing list as opposed to one list for everybody which is a little harder to draw meaningless numbers and statistics out of but if you want your numbers added to these things by all means come tell me I'll put this up in a blog post of some form but if all the numbers and the graphs don't matter I think that the question you want to know is what does matter and as I alluded to the process of finding them reveal more things and and maybe on day one there's some good food for thought and in what I picked up while I was trying to gather these numbers the first of the things is that the range is huge yes but that having an official discussion forum isn't really the factor that determines who's gonna have big numbers and who's not obviously there's things like if you're cross platform you're gonna have a lot more registered users because 1% of the Windows market is bigger than 95% of the Linux market but actually even if you're like the GIMP projects I don't want to back all the way up there but GIMP doesn't have one official forum but it on the website the project points people to several forums different languages and that's just as helpful to someone who wants to ask questions as having one official form is because otherwise the only way people find a discussion forum is googling for it which is exactly what I did trying to find these and that means I probably didn't find them all the other thing that I noticed when looking for a lot of these is that occasionally you see projects linking to other projects but that's actually pretty uncommon and I don't know that there's a reason we shouldn't point people to other projects because everyone knows if you're creating something you're gonna use not just one project maybe if it's a blender you don't use any other projects but for everybody else you use Inkscape and GIMP and Darktable and all of this things together and there's a surprising number of people who on a discussion forum will be struggling with something in an Inkscape and they haven't ever tried GIMP or they don't know about it and that's peculiar if you're in this room then you know all these people but that's really not intuitive to everyone else the other thing that I picked up on is that there's sort of a divide between users helping each other on discussion forums and interacting with a project like I don't know that we don't do a whole lot of ask the developers sort of they ask me anything model from Reddit I don't know that we put out as many announcements and invite as much feedback on these discussion forums that are basically user-centric as we could and there's I don't know there's there's reasons for that like if you're the developers didn't work on mailing list because if your whole job goes through email that's a lot more natural and that's not how someone wants to interact if there's one question because when you sign up for a mailing list you don't just sign up for the thread you start you sign up for all of it so there's some disconnects there that I think we could probably improve on just in terms of like reaching out to whenever there's a new release and that kind of thing the whole idea of unifying the the mailing list where some of the users are in the web forum or others are that's pretty hard and we all know that I don't know that it's impossible though because there are people that do that like Mozilla does a pretty good job of having the same discussions available in a web browser and email and in news groups if another some was ill people here I'd love to hear how they do that there's not a lot of good open source solutions for doing that and the last thing to note is that I figured out we really owe for maintainers a great deal of thanks because they do a lot of work maintaining software that I would not want to maintain and I don't know that we did as much inviting of forum people here as we could have so if you are for maintainer thank you thank you for sharing your numbers with me but thank you for the work you do connecting people and I hope that next year I at least can do a better job of reaching out to the forums ahead of time and that's all