James Falkner

342 points
James Falkner's picture
Orlando

Technology evangelist, teacher, learner, author, dedicated to open source and open computing. I work at Red Hat as a technical evangelist for Red Hat's portfolio of open source products and love what we do and learning from others, and occasionally teaching at conferences.

Prior to Red Hat I spent 5 years at Liferay growing a large open source community, onboarding new contributors, meeting and engaging with beginners and experts, and championing open source as the de facto choice for businesses large and small. I am based in the Orlando, Florida, USA area.

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Time on site, bounce rate, repeat visitors, "fallen angels" (those that used to visit and have disappeared), engagement tracking (are your readers moving from "wallflowers" to "core reader" to "engaging commentator" to "author"? how many moved up? how many moved down?). These are a bit closer to the goals of opensource.com, which is to "create a connection point for conversations about the broader impact that open source can have—and is having—even beyond the software world". Ideally you could trace open source adoption back to patient 0 - the article that someone from the organization read and inspired them - but that's incredibly difficult (and usually approximated with regular surveys of readers). So you try to get as close to ideal as possible, with the resources you have. It's more difficult than just looking at google analytics, for sure.. but in my opinion, finding a better set of metrics lets you escape the ad trap and forces you to focus on achieving your goals. I'm getting ahead of myself now :)