Hey, I would like to create a press release and some presentation about Foundation’s Partners for future opportunities and I need some statistics. It will be best if somebody could give me access to view the OpenMRS Analytics site. Do you know who I should ask for?
Hey @zuzanna! What sort of statistics are you looking for? Downloads? Contributors? Commits? We have a variety of sources for our data and knowing what you are interested in can help me either point you in the right direction or share the data with you.
1 Like
Hey @jennifer
I’m looking for numbers of visitors, downloads, contributors, views, active implementations also popularity of your articles in the internet. In short: your marketing potential
1 Like
Hey @burke Are you able to share the view for me of OpenMRS’ Analytics?
Thanks in advance
Hello, I would ask if I can talk to somebody who could give me the view of OpenMRS’ Analytics? @jennifer
Hey @zuzanna! Let’s set up a time to talk about the statistics you need beyond what I shared with the community last month - and what you can do in order to get access to additional data.
1 Like
Okay, I didn’t think that data from Analytics is a part of a secret but I’m curious about the requirements that I must meet to know these piece of information.
Thanks, looking forward to the meeting
Hey @zuzanna! The data isn’t necessarily a secret and I’m optimistic that we can work together to provide you with the data you are interested in and need.
1 Like
Yeah, I hope we’ll find the solution 
As long as you are optimistic I am too
Hi @jennifer,
I will try to shed some light why @zuzanna is asking to get the access to the OpenMRS analytics.
SolDevelo is supporting OpenMRS since December 2013. During the first years we mainly contributed technically and there were periods that the contributions from SolDevelo made up the majority of activity in the OpenMRS repositories. Dozens of people engaged, thousands of hours spent, hundreds of tickets completed (OpenMRS/SolDevelo cooperation in numbers - 2015, https://www.soldevelo.com/blog/soldevelo-tech-talk-6-openmrs/). We were responsible for such initiatives like Android client, QA/test automation, SDK, Sync2. During the last years we changed our involvement, as we established our foundation (https://soldevelofoundation.org/) to cooperate with social impact projects. Our focus is now mainly related to helping with community building, marketing activities and social impact multiplexing.
@zuzanna is helping OpenMRS with the new website implementation, working on its content, preparing layouts, choosing the right templates and creating demo server to demonstrate the proposed solutions. Moreover, she organized and supervised the internship contest that tried to bring new contributors to the community.
Our current goal related to OpenMRS is to help by increasing its outreach. The bigger the project recognition the easier it should be to acquire new contributors, implementers, donors and supporters. Moreover, the increased popularity should also decrease the costs of new project adoptions and should strengthen OpenMRS as one of the most valued and impactful Global Goods to improve UHC.
How the OpenMRS could be better promoted without any serious investments?
The answer is simple - by increasing its visibility in the Internet. Example activities:
-
The new website should be built taking into consideration how the visitors are behaving, what content they would like to read, which subpages do more harm than benefits. Such meaningful information can be only obtained by reading detailed analytics reports with understanding. You cannot get that information by asking on the forum what people do or don’t like.
-
The new website with a very valuable content (small bounce rates, long sessions duration, increasing number of users and sessions) should be broadly promoted, for example by using Google Ads grants (10,000 USD per month) for advertising. However, the target audience should be also carefully set, which cannot be done without access to analytics.
@jennifer The numbers you posted at OpenMRS By the Numbers: 2020 Q3 are valuable, but do not bring any meaningful information about how OpenMRS website is behaving and how we could improve it to help OpenMRS grow.
This is why we ask you to get the access to OpenMRS analytics.
Please let me know in case of any questions.
Thank you in advance!
Regards, Jakub.
FYI @burke @herbert24
2 Likes
Thanks @jslawinski for the context and for SolDevelo’s amazing & ongoing contributions & commitment to the OpenMRS community! We’ll make sure @zuzanna gets what she needs.
Thank you @burke!
I am sure the results will be awesome!
Thanks for the additional information, @jslawinski. @zuzanna and I can talk about the best way to get access to the data needed.
In addition, I think there are some larger questions about metrics and data for us to look at together, as a community:
- What data will help the OpenMRS community tell our story in a compelling way?
- What data will help us attract and direct new contributors so that their experience is satisfying and they stay with the community for the long term?
Answering these questions will help us decide the key metrics for us to track. We may decide that some of the data that we’ve been tracking for the past five years don’t tell as compelling a story as other data. And we’re not limited to the data available from Google Analytics. Others are in Talk, Slack, and github.
@jslawinski, I hear you about those stats I shared. I really had to ask myself: what is that data telling us? What story is it telling? Why are we tracking it? And this post about signups helped me look at those statistics in a new light. I believe at least some of the data we have been tracking tells us how many people took the first step from being a passive consumer of information about OpenMRS and our community to trying OpenMRS out, to then sharing and collaborating with the community.
Even as we consider how our website can help attract new contributors and investors, I’d like to keep onboarding in mind. Having a clearly defined pathway set up so that newcomers can onboard and find ways to contribute or invest that align with their interests goes hand in hand with outreach. We know that newbies come to our community and many leave because they hit a wall. I think your experience with Soldevelo’s internship program highlights the importance of coordinating closely with the community around this critical step.
I’m excited that we’re working on specific documentation that will take that wall down, thanks to technical writers like @rainbow and @madhens, who have been revamping our new developer guide and working on a new volunteer guide. Those are foundational onboarding pieces!
4 Likes
Thanks, @jennifer for the meeting. It showed me we think in a similar way and I’m sure we could achieve many great things together. As I’ll get the view to Analytics we could start thinking about how we should improve statistics and what important message they bring to us. Let me know when we can start working on that @burke
As soon as I get them I’ll try to tell you more about my ideas.
Looking forward, Susan
1 Like
@jennifer It would be great if you also invite me to the analytics with the read-only access. I am really excited that we can achieve great things together!
Zuzzana,
Your project sounds fantastic and so necessary, and finding out the ‘path’ visitors take through the website, as well as the obstacles they encounter, will help the entire organization. I also think that information will help us learn where to incorporate the new guides into the website, and help us not replicate the old obstacles in the new documentation!
Monica
1 Like
Yeah, I totally agree. If only we spend few minutes and take a look at Analytics we could avoid a lot of mistakes which are on the current website. I think that Analytics also help find a solution or a source of community’s problem like lack of new volunteers or loosing too many new members. For sure, Google Analytics is a necessary tool.
1 Like
Better yet: we can export and then publish some of the views that @zuzanna and I talked about on the Wiki or on Talk so that everyone has access to the same data. Maybe this can be a part of a “community health” dashboard where we share a core set of metrics, not only from Google Analytics, but also from Talk, Slack, and github?
Great, if these numbers could give us a meaningful info how OpenMRS website is behaving and how we could improve it to help OpenMRS grow then perfect. Any ETA when you could share these reports?
1 Like