Posts Tagged ‘statistics’

Community statistics in Fedora and beyond — and where it’s going from here

September 10th, 2009

During my summer internship with Red Hat’s Community Architecture team, my main assignment was to build an automated platform (which eventually was built into Fedora Community) for generating and displaying statistics within our community.

Needless to say, it didn’t get done. :) But it did get a healthy start, and even though the last couple of months I haven’t been extremely active in Fedora, it’s still alive and well.

This week, I started working on a research paper for my independent study at my high school. This independent study just happens to be continuing work on the project that I started a couple of months ago. The paper will include mostly primary sources of what people have said on Stats 2.0’s discussion page on the wiki, but I would love to talk with people on IRC about what they think is important to track so we can analyze not only the growth of the Fedora, but the growth of the community.

It doesn’t end with the one-semester independent study. I am presenting on this subject at UTOSC 2009. In this presentation I will discuss many of the variables of a free software community that can be tracked, and even provide example code and where to get started on automatically tracking them.

So, there’s the state of the Stats 2.0. Would you like to speak with me on IRC sometime about what you think is important to be tracked?

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Statistics 2.0: The beginnings

July 6th, 2009

I’ve been doing some work on getting a Statistics application in Fedora Community. It’s very weak as it stands — only shows you two wiki-related things right now — but now that I’ve kind of meandered around the code a bunch, I think I have a better idea of what I’m doing, and it shouldn’t be difficult to churn out code for other parts of Fedora’s stuff now.

Currently, we have a Grid widget and a Flot widget. Grids are used for displaying data in, well, a grid, and Flot widgets are used for nice, pretty charts. (The awesome thing about Flot is that it uses pure HTML to create charts. How about that?!)

I need to thank Luke Macken and J5 for all the help I’ve gotten from them so far. :)

So let’s go through how you can test this and see the magic unfold. (And potentially figure out how to write code for you own use cases!)

  1. Install Luke’s repo file for TurboGears 2. It’s not all in Fedora yet so this is necessary. You can find the repo files at http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/rpms/tg2/.
  2. Install moksha. 
    # yum install moksha
  3. Pull fedoracommunity.git. 
    $ git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/fedoracommunity.git

    (If you’ve got a FAS account and you’ve ever used Hosted before, it’s usually a good idea to use ssh://, IMHO. Makes it easier to push later if you get push access. The URL for that is ssh://git.fedorahosted.org/git/fedoracommunity.git)

  4. Create the stats branch locally, and pull from the remote stats branch. 
    $ cd fedoracommunity/; git checkout -b stats; git pull origin stats
  5. Now, I don’t know if this is the proper way to do it, but it’s portable and it works. Before you can start up paster to serve the content, an egg needs to be created. 
    $ python setup.py egg_info
  6. Then you can run paster: 
    $ paster serve development.ini

    And yay!

The important files to note are fedoracommunity/connectors/wikiconnector.py, fedoracommunity/mokshaapps/statistics/widgets/wiki.py, and fedoracommunity/mokshaapps/statistics/templates/wiki_active_pages.mak. My next priority is to get stats for how FAS groups grow over time.

Happy hacking! :)

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Gnumeric and Excel

August 10th, 2008

I just ran across a neat little PDF showing problems in Gnumeric being fixed by their developers while the same problems in Excel not being fixed by Microsoft. Most of these are statistically related, and I do have a bit of background on them.

This is quite interesting, and in my opinion, proves the spirit of open source. ;)

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