View Communication Activities

Roles: Developer, Community Manager, Project Manager

Where: Communication dashboards are available from the Chat Room and Mailing List drop-down lists.

Chat Room provides metrics of slack activity, and Mailing List provides metrics of Groups.io and Pipermail. A mailing list is a common way for project community members to interact with others in a project. Mailing lists are often set up so that all members can send to the list. Members can ask questions and get help or provide information to others on the list. A busy mailing list can be a good indicator of the health of community engagement in the project. For our analysis, we will consider Pipermail as an example here.

Do these steps:

1. Click a project name of interest.

2. From the Mailing List drop-down list, select Pipermail > Overview. A dashboard shows information about email activity in projects and who sent emails and when. Information about the corresponding organization is also provided. For detail, see Pipermail > Overview.

3. Use the visualizations to understand aspects of mailing list activities for the project. Any conversation or discussion in a mailing list can be helpful to a project by solving bugs or even providing potential seeds for new features, new products, and so on. For example, you might be interested how active an organization's mailing list is—look at the analytics for the organization such as the Emails By Organizations doughnut chart: In another example, you hold in high esteem a community member and want to see if this person participates actively in the project—look at the Email Senders analytics.