Tag: web

TL;DR

• Our MoFo dashboards now have trendlines based on known activity to date
• The recent uptick in activity is partly new contributors, and partly new recognition of existing contributors (all of which is good, but some of which is misleading for the trendline in the short term)
• Below is a rambling analogy for thinking about our contributor goals and how we answer the question ‘are we on track for 2014?’
• + if you haven’t seen it, OpenMatt has crisply summarized a tonne of the data and insights that we’ve unpicked during Maker Party

Stacking Logs

I was stacking logs over the weekend, and wondering if I had enough for winter, when it struck me that this might be a useful analogy for a post I was planning to write. So bear with me, I hope this works…

To be clear, this is an analogy about predicting and planning, not a metaphor for contributors* 😀

So the trendline looks good, but…

Trendlines can be misleading.

What if our task was gathering and splitting logs?

We’re halfway through the year, and the log store is half full. The important questions is, ‘will it be full when the snow starts falling?‘

Well, it depends.

It depends how quickly we add new logs to the store, and it depends how many get used.

So let’s push this analogy a bit.

Before this year, we had scattered stacks of logs here and there, in teams and projects. Some we knew about, some we didn’t. Some we thought were big stacks of logs but were actually stacked on top of something else.

Setting a target was like building a log store and deciding to fill it. We built ours to hold 10,000 logs. There was a bit of guesswork in that.

It took a while to gather up our existing logs (build our databases and counting tools). But the good news is, we had more logs than we thought.

Now we need to start finding and splitting more logs*.

Switching from analogy to reality for a minute…

This week we added trendlines to our dashboard. These are two linear regression lines. One based on all activity for the year to-date, and one based on the most recent 4 weeks. It gives a quick feedback mechanism on whether recent actions are helping us towards to our targets and whether we’re improving over the year to-date.

These are interesting, but can be misleading given our current working practices. The trendline implies some form of destiny. You do a load of work recruiting new contributors, see the trendline is on target, and relax. But relaxing isn’t an option because of the way we’re currently recruiting contributors.

Switching back to the analogy…

We’re mostly splitting logs by hand.

Things happen because we go out and make them happen.

Hard work is the reason we have 1,800 Maker Party events on the map this year and we’re only half-way through the campaign.

There’s a lot to be said for this way of making things happen, and I think there’s enough time left in the year to fill the log store this way.

But this is not mathematical or automated, which makes trendlines based on this activity a bit misleading.

In this mode of working, the answer to ‘Are we on track for 2014?‘ is: ‘the log store will be filled… if we fill it‘.

Scaling

As we move forward, and think about scale… say a hundred-thousand logs (or even better, a Million Mozillians). We need to think about log splitting machines (or ‘systems’).

Systems can be tested, tuned, modified and multiplied. In a world of ‘systems’ we can apply trendlines to our graphs that are much better predictors of future growth.

We should be experimenting with systems now (and we are a little bit). But we don’t yet know what the contributor growth system looks like that works as well as the analogous log splitting machines of the forestry industry. These are things to be invented, tested and iterated on, but I wouldn’t bet on them as the solution for 2014 as this could take a while to solve.

I should also state explicitly that systems are not necessarily software (or hardware). Technology is a relatively small part of the systems of movement building. For an interesting but time consuming distraction, this talk on Social Machines from last week’s Wikimania conference is worth a ponder:

Predicting 2014 today?

Even if you’re splitting logs by hand, you can schedule time to do it. Plan each month, check in on targets and spend more or less time as required to stay on track for the year.

This boils down to a planning exercise, with a little bit of guess work to get started.

In simple terms, you list all the things you plan to do this year that could recruit contributors, and how many contributors you think each will recruit. As you complete some of these activities you reflect on your predictions, and modify the plans and update estimates for the rest of the year.

Geoffrey has put together a training workshop for this, along with a spreadsheet structure to make this simple for teams to implement. It’s not scary, and it helps you get a grip on the future.

From there, we can start to feed our planned activity and forecast recruitment numbers into our dashboard as a trendline rather than relying solely on past activity.

The manual nature of the splitting-wood-like-activity means what we plan to do is a much more important predictor of the future than extrapolating what we have done in the past, and that changing the future is something you can go out and do.

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*Contributors are not logs. Do not swing axes at them, and do not under any circumstances put them in your fireplace or wood burning stove.