Josh Simmons

160 points

Petaluma, CA

Josh Simmons serves as President of the Open Source Initiative and Ecosystem Strategy Lead at Tidelift. Josh is a short stack developer and community organizer, and in a previous life worked as a freelancer and a startup CEO (RIP).

Open Minded Emerging Contributor Award 2017 Author PHP Python Web developer Community Manager

Authored Content

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Authored Comments

joshsimmons

6 Apr 2016

How to hurdle community management obstacles

I didn't get as far as I'd like to have in fleshing this out, but there are a few categories of metrics that come to mind: growth, engagement, and retention.

Growth might include: new followers or contributors. Engagement: commits, comments, issues, replies, retweets. Retention: max and avg lifespan of a user or contributor and abandonment rates.

There are some benefits/metrics of a well run community that don't necessarily fit those categories, though. For instance: savings, eg, how much are you saving in support costs by way of community members providing support to each other? Or: how much has the cost of "acquisition" gone down by merit of having enthusiastic community members singing your praises?