On 01/08/2013 10:31 PM, Rovastar wrote: > Nearly every site now has twitter, facebook, google plus, youtube channel, > etc links. We have these social media outlets lets tell people about them. > > They could easily go under the "Make a donation" button as a 2x2 grid of > icons for the big 4 social networks. > > I think this would improve the connectivity of the site to our other social > outlets. Give an official stamp of approval. Improve the social aspect of > it, increase numbers to these social channels. Help people find video > tutorial and spread the word of osm further. > > I cannot see any harm in this it would take up very little screen real > estate and I think look a more professional cohesive community. I may be a grumpy old dinosaur but I don't see how diluting the Openstreetmap brand into the bland broth of proprietary centralized social services that plague the Internet nowadays will bring any value... But that's just my worthless opinion - and there are luckily other methods available to determine what will be valuable to us. Asking users and prospects does not work because the user's wishes may not quite be what he needs and the prospect may not even know what he wants. So we might rather turn to observing their behaviour and deducing what to bring forth to them : to improve something first requires measuring it.
Let's take an utterly consensual goal for example : increasing the number of new contributors. We do have cute graphs to monitor that - but, unless I'm mistaken, we don't seem know much about where those people come from. How did they land on the web site, what brought them there, what information did they look for, what they searched for on the site, where did their cursor hover, what did they click on, what other sites in the Openstreetmap galaxy did they visit, how long did they take to make up their minds and register, what display resolution should the web editor be optimized for, what sort of data do they contribute and how does that relate to the way we acquired them ? The site's administrators already have some fragments of the picture - but we need a better one and we need to bring it out so that improvement proposals are rooted in more nourishing data and less fancyful speculation : we are not our target. To get that better picture, we need to start with web analytics tools - the bread and butter of online marketers nowadays... Yes, I'm afraid we are actually talking about marketing - don't feel dirty : it is just another free software job and the only objective way to make the home page improvement discussions more efficient. There is already an analytics tool at http://piwik.openstreetmap.org - it monitors http://www.openstreetmap.org... But why don't we instrument the wiki with it ? Or everything else for that matter ? And who has access to those reports ? Is there any reason not to make them public ? Openstreetmap is not a unique case : in the end it is all about conversions - just like any other web site that sells something (Openstreetmap sells free collaborative mapping). So let's set goals, conversion funnels, funnel segmentations, engagement metrics; let's quantify everything in sight, track abandonment rates and qualify them too. Then let's set up experimental improvements, observe how they modify user behaviour, measure, decide whether to keep them, rinse, repeat. Some people will soon want to get fancy with A/B testing or behavioral targeting, but we'll certainly want to keep it simple - at least until Openstreetmap's iterative funnel optimization process reaches such decreasing returns that it hungers for cutting edge sophistication. So let's feed the discussion with data, generate hypothesis, test them and iterate. Hypothesis generation and how to test them is going to raise debates, but that will be more rational than random wishlist items thrown at the mailing list. But first, can we agree that user behaviour data is the raw material ? _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
