Topic on Talk:New Developers/Quarterly/2017-10

Hello,

Thanks for compiling this report − very interesting!

I am curious about the retention of events. How is the number of developers attracted (eg for the Wikimedia Hackathon, 37) computed? Is that based on the registration survey? (For comparison, the report of that event mentions 56 newcomers)

From there, the 3 retained is based on a Kibana query.

• the query only contains 19 usernames. I guess it is because we don’t have the usernames of the 18 others?
• the query appears to look through Gerrit data ; is that a deliberate choice? I would have thought that contribution to any Technical space would count as retained − the same query against Maniphest appears to return 5 users.

@Jean-Frédéric Thanks for your question! Yes, we are relying on the registration survey. Members of TC went through the events registration spreadsheet to remove folks who may not be new developers such as staff members, who we didn't see at the event, folks who have been already active for a while, etc. The final list had 37 developers (from Vienna). We tried to look up for more information for people (whom we didn't have any Phabricator, Gerrit username info) in Wikimedia Biterg using their email address. Then we could gather usernames of only 19 people. (some more info here)

For this report, we have target new developers who have contributed at least one patch in the last 90 days. For the survey that we sent out, for the metrics we gathered, we considered the same audience. And, so the query containing 19 usernames looks through Gerrit data. 

Having said that, yes we need to improve on measuring this data better, key finding 7 in the report New Developers/Quarterly/2017-10#Key findings :)

@AKlapper (WMF) might be able to shed more light on this if I've missed anything as he is the master mind behind pulling all this together :P

@Jean-Frédéric: Good questions. And thanks for your interest. :)

In addition to what Srishti already wrote:

19 usernames indeed because we could not find any activity in the data for the 18 other usernames. But that might be because https://wikimedia.biterg.io for example does not cover activity on GitHub where some projects are located.

Concentrating on Gerrit data became a choice at some point. I first queried on the mainpage of https://wikimedia.biterg.io for the usernames but then had to realize https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177566#3663047. The pleasure of working with systems that you need to understand. :P Also note that the Maniphest query will only show you users who created a task, but not users who for example commented on a task. See for example https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161926 or https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161928.

And https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T175854 provides even more technical details about the Kibana queries that you might not want to dive into. :)