 Hi everyone, I'm Peter O'Neill. Today we're gonna talk about how to use metrics to understand what's going on in your community. I work for Styra, the founders of Open Policy Agent. I'm also the Open Policy Agent community advocate, so you can come and ask me, OPA questions if you want. I'm gonna be at the OPA kiosk every day. So today's agenda, right? We're gonna talk about avoiding vanity metrics. We're gonna talk about how to connect everything together, bringing in all of your tools into one place. How to group your community members so you understand what things to do for which groups and to know what things are going to work to get them to those other groups. Then we're gonna talk about the phases of your community growth cycle, starting from one phase, understanding what is the next growth phase, how to make that bigger, and so on. So first off, we're gonna talk about vanity metrics. Starting here for most communities is okay. These metrics are going to be things that are very simple to track. These are going to be things like follower count, GitHub stars, number of installs. And while these metrics are fine to start, these aren't going to say the full story. So what you wanna do is turn number of followers into daily, weekly, monthly active users so you know how many followers are coming back. And when you're talking about a number of installs, you wanna turn this into how many successful onboarding members did you get, right? When you're talking about number of stars, you wanna turn these into things like getting to your first contribution, right? And so each of these things takes that first step from your community member and tracks what happens after that so that you know where they are. So you have these metrics and you understand how involved these community members are so that you can take them to the next level. So metrics are everywhere, right? Meaning that all of your tools have data. So it's just a matter of taking this data from all of your tool sets and bringing them into one place. And so there are many tools out there already that are gonna help you understand what's going on with your community. You just have to integrate them. And so there are some great tools like common room orbit and Savannah HQ. And each of these are going to already have integrations to the tools you already use like GitHub, Slack, Discord, Stack Overflow and more, right? And so you have all of this rich data. All you have to do is figure out how to consolidate it in one place so that you can figure out how to create the metrics are gonna help you grow your community, right? And while these tools may seem intimidating at first, you're able to integrate them fairly easily. And for anything that doesn't already exist as an integration there's tools like Zapier that are going to be low code and no code tools to help you build these integrations with just a few clicks. And so tools like Zapier are good for technical and non-technical community managers. And so with the groups in your community, right? So you have these various levels and you may have heard these levels called various things. These are the terms that I like to use lurkers, newbies, contributors and champions. And so as your community members start off and go through these levels, they advance, right? And lurkers are going to be the largest part of your community. And so when you're looking at your lurkers you're gonna wanna understand the types of content that they are consuming so that you can make sure that they always have enough of it and that your community is creating the right kinds of content. And then this is going to lead into them turning into newbies, which is them making their first comment, creating their first post, doing their first thing, right? And then you're able to start tracking what things got them into this first engagement. And so you're able to build those programs, right? And then once you have newbies turning into contributors, right? And the next stage here, these are your people who are sticking around and turn into your daily, weekly, monthly active users and want to be a part of the conversation. And once you understand exactly which things keep them coming back time after time you're gonna try to turn them into champions. And your champions are going to be the bread and butter of your community. These are gonna be the people who make the biggest impact. And so understanding what parts they really want to focus on so that you can empower and enable them, right? So you wanna track what talks they've given, what content they've created, how they're actually connected with the rest of your community. And so as your community is growing you're going to go through these stages, right? And this is a very common, a set of words here that explain the different stages. And so with Inception this is gonna be the initial stage where you're tracking a lot of these vanity metrics where you just want to know, hey, I wanna build this new thing. I just need as many sign ups as possible. Then you move into establishment. This is when you have a little bit of traction and you start tracking those daily, weekly, monthly active users that I mentioned. And as you go into maturity and this is going to be the largest part where you want to start tracking impact. And then eventually when you enter mitosis this is when your community starts to create subgroups and create communities of their own, right? When people wanna break it down and start their own things you wanna identify these community leaders and empower them to create those subgroups. And with that I wanna say thank you and to go out and create a community around something that you're passionate about.