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Open source software is more than just code. It’s also about the people who create, use, and contribute to it. One of the key factors to the rise of open source software is the power of community. Community is not only a source of users, but also a source of contributors, advocates, evangelists, and potential employees. Community is what gives open source software feedback, validation, trust, and loyalty. It is what makes open source software better and more relevant. But how do you build and maintain a strong and engaged community around your open source product or service? And how do you leverage the community to grow your business and achieve your goals?
Ian Tien (Mattermost’s CEO) explained how building software for free attracted a lot of people who wanted to help the project because they were getting a lot of value out of it. He said: “A lot of people just tend to help you [when you’re building software for free], right? Because they’re getting a lot of value out of it. And it’s not like you’re hard selling them […] You’re building something you love. People respond to the value.”
One of the ways that open source communities demonstrate their power is by organizing themselves and organizing meetups and events to connect with each other and promote their project. Saurav Pathak, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Bagisto, revealed the project’s strategy of creating a global network of ambassadors who organized local events around the product. Bagisto recruited ambassadors from different countries and gave them the resources and support to host local gatherings and spread the word about the product. According to Saurav: “I think it’s a huge success for us that some people are taking initiative and they are actually working around Bagisto and doing these small meetups.”
It becomes evident that building a community around your open source project is a great way to attract contributors, users and supporters. But how do you know if your community is healthy and thriving? How do you measure the impact and value of your community efforts? That’s where metrics come in.
Metrics are quantitative and qualitative indicators that help you track and evaluate the performance and progress of your community. There is no one-size-fits-all way to measure an open source community. Different projects may have different goals, audiences, and challenges. Georg Link, Director of Sales at Bitergia, told us: “Depending on the use case, there are different metrics that I would look at. But the common denominator is the number of contributions and the activity in the project.”
What Investors Want to See in Your Community Metrics:
Investing in open source projects is not the same as investing in traditional software companies. Therefore, investors need to understand the dynamics and health of these communities, as well as the value they generate for the project and its users.
Unlike traditional software companies, open source projects do not have standard metrics such as revenue, profit, or market share. Instead, they have different indicators that reflect their community activity, engagement, growth, diversity, quality, and impact. These indicators can help investors assess the viability, sustainability, and scalability of open source projects, as well as their alignment with their own goals and values.
Jana Iris, investor at TQ Ventures, mentions the metrics she has followed and suggests various metrics such as the amount of activities, the number of posts per week, responses to GitHub issues. She explains that at her previous company, HashiCorp, the goal was to educate and familiarize people with the product, which resulted in signups to their existing learning platform. Jana said: “Of course, each team had its own specific number, like tracking core contributor sentiment over time, tracking ambassador engagement over time, tracking Slack engagement or GitHub discussions. So there's various ways you can look at the health of the project.”
Joseph Jacks, founder and investor at OSS Capital, has a different approach to evaluating open source communities. He believes that the most important metric to look at from an investor’s perspective is growth rate, more specifically the rate of growth of external contributors. He explains that external contributors are the ones who drive adoption, innovation, and value creation for open source projects. However, not all growth metrics are equally interesting or meaningful for Jacks. He says that some metrics, such as the rate of growth of GitHub stars, are not very useful or reliable indicators of community health or value. According to Jacks: “I think that, on its own, it doesn't give you a strong proxy for actual usage and actual adoption.”
Jacks also emphasizes the importance of building relationships with the founders of open source projects as humans, not just as potential investments. He explains: “We, in fact, had to actually have a reasonable sense of conviction well before the creators themselves even had the conviction, which makes it even harder.”
The Most Important Community Metrics to Track, According to the Experts:
If you are running or contributing to an open source community, you may wonder what are the most important metrics to measure its success and impact. However, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Depending on your background, goals and role, you may have different metrics that you prefer or different methods of measuring them. For instance, someone running a foundation may look at metrics very differently than someone looking at it from a sales and marketing perspective. Similarly, someone working in developer relations may have a different perspective than someone working in engineering or product management. In this section, we will compare and contrast the views of these different stakeholders and explore the most important community metrics to track for each of them.
Maxim Wheatly, Head of Global Marketing and Sales at Merico, identifies three metrics that he uses to evaluate the health and performance of their community: “For me, those metrics are Slack growth, new contributors, and retention. They give me insights into discoverability, community growth, and user engagement.“
Although it is beneficial to have clear and specific metrics to measure your community’s success, some experts in the field suggest that numbers are not everything. They argue that there are other aspects of community health and value that cannot be easily quantified or captured by standard indicators.
When it comes to measuring the health and brand recognizability of an open source project, there are several metrics that go beyond numbers and statistics. Kaj Arnö, CEO of the MariaDB Foundation, highlights that by listening to the anecdotes of your friends, family, colleagues, or peers, you can learn about their awareness and understanding of your project. He also advocates mixing both these anecdotes and more concrete metrics to get a more well-rounded picture saying: “Looking at Jira and observing how contributions grow and how they're handled, including votes on Jira items, allows us to understand what people truly desire. Unlike those stars, they do offer valuable assistance.”
Depending on the role and the organization, DevRel professionals may have different goals and objectives. Therefore, it is important to define and measure the right metrics that align with the specific goals and objectives of each role and organization. Patrick McFadin, Developer Advocate at DataStax, revealed that the most meaningful metrics for him revolve mostly around engagement and community contributions such as the number of contributed articles and posted use cases. He says: “After all, you're creating content for people to use, so measuring their usage is important. These metrics can be quite helpful in determining what resonates and what doesn't with the community. By analyzing such data, we can make informed decisions.”
Move Beyond Vanity Metrics and Measure What Really Matters for Your Community:
However, not all metrics are equally meaningful or useful for every project. Some metrics may be misleading or irrelevant, such as GitHub stars, which do not reflect the actual quality, impact, or sustainability of a project.
GitHub stars are a simple way to show appreciation or interest in a project, but they do not indicate how many people are actually using, contributing to, or benefiting from it. GitHub stars can also be easily manipulated or inflated by bots, campaigns, or incentives. Therefore, relying too much on such so-called “vanity metrics'' as a measure of success can be counterproductive or deceptive.
Joe Karlsson, Developer Advocate at Tinybird, suggested that it’s also important to have in mind the “why” of tracking specific metrics and checking if it aligns with the business goals. About this, he said: “I think it affects the quality or what you're doing with that content too. You could do something that's salesy and really push hard to convert people, but it may turn people away or push them to sign up for GitHub stars and forget that your community isn't growing”
Conclusion
In this blog, we have explored how to measure the success of your open source community. We have seen that community is a key factor for the growth and impact of open source software, and that metrics can help you track and evaluate your community’s health and value. We have heard from experts in the field who shared their insights and experiences on how they use metrics to build and maintain strong and engaged communities around their open source projects.
We hope that this blog has given you some useful tips and ideas on how to measure your own open source community’s success. Remember that metrics are not an end in themselves, but a means to an end. They are tools that can help you understand your community better, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and improve its performance and impact. However, metrics are not everything. They cannot capture the human and social aspects of community, such as trust, loyalty, passion, and collaboration. These are the intangible qualities that make open source communities unique and powerful. Therefore, while you use metrics to measure your community’s success, don’t forget to also celebrate your community’s spirit.
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Open source software is more than just code. It’s also about the people who create, use, and contribute to it. One of the key factors to the rise of open source software is the power of community. Community is not only a source of users, but also a source of contributors, advocates, evangelists, and potential employees. Community is what gives open source software feedback, validation, trust, and loyalty. It is what makes open source software better and more relevant. But how do you build and maintain a strong and engaged community around your open source product or service? And how do you leverage the community to grow your business and achieve your goals?
Ian Tien (Mattermost’s CEO) explained how building software for free attracted a lot of people who wanted to help the project because they were getting a lot of value out of it. He said: “A lot of people just tend to help you [when you’re building software for free], right? Because they’re getting a lot of value out of it. And it’s not like you’re hard selling them […] You’re building something you love. People respond to the value.”
One of the ways that open source communities demonstrate their power is by organizing themselves and organizing meetups and events to connect with each other and promote their project. Saurav Pathak, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Bagisto, revealed the project’s strategy of creating a global network of ambassadors who organized local events around the product. Bagisto recruited ambassadors from different countries and gave them the resources and support to host local gatherings and spread the word about the product. According to Saurav: “I think it’s a huge success for us that some people are taking initiative and they are actually working around Bagisto and doing these small meetups.”
It becomes evident that building a community around your open source project is a great way to attract contributors, users and supporters. But how do you know if your community is healthy and thriving? How do you measure the impact and value of your community efforts? That’s where metrics come in.
Metrics are quantitative and qualitative indicators that help you track and evaluate the performance and progress of your community. There is no one-size-fits-all way to measure an open source community. Different projects may have different goals, audiences, and challenges. Georg Link, Director of Sales at Bitergia, told us: “Depending on the use case, there are different metrics that I would look at. But the common denominator is the number of contributions and the activity in the project.”
What Investors Want to See in Your Community Metrics:
Investing in open source projects is not the same as investing in traditional software companies. Therefore, investors need to understand the dynamics and health of these communities, as well as the value they generate for the project and its users.
Unlike traditional software companies, open source projects do not have standard metrics such as revenue, profit, or market share. Instead, they have different indicators that reflect their community activity, engagement, growth, diversity, quality, and impact. These indicators can help investors assess the viability, sustainability, and scalability of open source projects, as well as their alignment with their own goals and values.
Jana Iris, investor at TQ Ventures, mentions the metrics she has followed and suggests various metrics such as the amount of activities, the number of posts per week, responses to GitHub issues. She explains that at her previous company, HashiCorp, the goal was to educate and familiarize people with the product, which resulted in signups to their existing learning platform. Jana said: “Of course, each team had its own specific number, like tracking core contributor sentiment over time, tracking ambassador engagement over time, tracking Slack engagement or GitHub discussions. So there's various ways you can look at the health of the project.”
Joseph Jacks, founder and investor at OSS Capital, has a different approach to evaluating open source communities. He believes that the most important metric to look at from an investor’s perspective is growth rate, more specifically the rate of growth of external contributors. He explains that external contributors are the ones who drive adoption, innovation, and value creation for open source projects. However, not all growth metrics are equally interesting or meaningful for Jacks. He says that some metrics, such as the rate of growth of GitHub stars, are not very useful or reliable indicators of community health or value. According to Jacks: “I think that, on its own, it doesn't give you a strong proxy for actual usage and actual adoption.”
Jacks also emphasizes the importance of building relationships with the founders of open source projects as humans, not just as potential investments. He explains: “We, in fact, had to actually have a reasonable sense of conviction well before the creators themselves even had the conviction, which makes it even harder.”
The Most Important Community Metrics to Track, According to the Experts:
If you are running or contributing to an open source community, you may wonder what are the most important metrics to measure its success and impact. However, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Depending on your background, goals and role, you may have different metrics that you prefer or different methods of measuring them. For instance, someone running a foundation may look at metrics very differently than someone looking at it from a sales and marketing perspective. Similarly, someone working in developer relations may have a different perspective than someone working in engineering or product management. In this section, we will compare and contrast the views of these different stakeholders and explore the most important community metrics to track for each of them.
Maxim Wheatly, Head of Global Marketing and Sales at Merico, identifies three metrics that he uses to evaluate the health and performance of their community: “For me, those metrics are Slack growth, new contributors, and retention. They give me insights into discoverability, community growth, and user engagement.“
Although it is beneficial to have clear and specific metrics to measure your community’s success, some experts in the field suggest that numbers are not everything. They argue that there are other aspects of community health and value that cannot be easily quantified or captured by standard indicators.
When it comes to measuring the health and brand recognizability of an open source project, there are several metrics that go beyond numbers and statistics. Kaj Arnö, CEO of the MariaDB Foundation, highlights that by listening to the anecdotes of your friends, family, colleagues, or peers, you can learn about their awareness and understanding of your project. He also advocates mixing both these anecdotes and more concrete metrics to get a more well-rounded picture saying: “Looking at Jira and observing how contributions grow and how they're handled, including votes on Jira items, allows us to understand what people truly desire. Unlike those stars, they do offer valuable assistance.”
Depending on the role and the organization, DevRel professionals may have different goals and objectives. Therefore, it is important to define and measure the right metrics that align with the specific goals and objectives of each role and organization. Patrick McFadin, Developer Advocate at DataStax, revealed that the most meaningful metrics for him revolve mostly around engagement and community contributions such as the number of contributed articles and posted use cases. He says: “After all, you're creating content for people to use, so measuring their usage is important. These metrics can be quite helpful in determining what resonates and what doesn't with the community. By analyzing such data, we can make informed decisions.”
Move Beyond Vanity Metrics and Measure What Really Matters for Your Community:
However, not all metrics are equally meaningful or useful for every project. Some metrics may be misleading or irrelevant, such as GitHub stars, which do not reflect the actual quality, impact, or sustainability of a project.
GitHub stars are a simple way to show appreciation or interest in a project, but they do not indicate how many people are actually using, contributing to, or benefiting from it. GitHub stars can also be easily manipulated or inflated by bots, campaigns, or incentives. Therefore, relying too much on such so-called “vanity metrics'' as a measure of success can be counterproductive or deceptive.
Joe Karlsson, Developer Advocate at Tinybird, suggested that it’s also important to have in mind the “why” of tracking specific metrics and checking if it aligns with the business goals. About this, he said: “I think it affects the quality or what you're doing with that content too. You could do something that's salesy and really push hard to convert people, but it may turn people away or push them to sign up for GitHub stars and forget that your community isn't growing”
Conclusion
In this blog, we have explored how to measure the success of your open source community. We have seen that community is a key factor for the growth and impact of open source software, and that metrics can help you track and evaluate your community’s health and value. We have heard from experts in the field who shared their insights and experiences on how they use metrics to build and maintain strong and engaged communities around their open source projects.
We hope that this blog has given you some useful tips and ideas on how to measure your own open source community’s success. Remember that metrics are not an end in themselves, but a means to an end. They are tools that can help you understand your community better, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and improve its performance and impact. However, metrics are not everything. They cannot capture the human and social aspects of community, such as trust, loyalty, passion, and collaboration. These are the intangible qualities that make open source communities unique and powerful. Therefore, while you use metrics to measure your community’s success, don’t forget to also celebrate your community’s spirit.
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Successful open source projects don't always translate into successful open source businesses. However, by focusing on building a kick-ass product, raising awareness, making the product easier to use, and fostering a strong open source community, you can set the stage for converting users into paying customers.
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What is driving all this tech layoffs? , What is their impact on the open source software industry? We will walk through all the potential reasons from an economic downturn, herd mentality, excessive borrowing and spending due to low interest rates, and growth at all costs as the main reasons behind the layoffs. Companies can continue to grow in this tight economic market if they are focused on optimizing efficiency and sustaining the right growth.
At the All Things Open conference, Emily Omier, a seasoned positioning consultant, sat down with Avi Press (Founder and CEO, Scarf) and Matt Yonkovit (The HOSS, Scarf) to discuss how to message, position, and validate your open source product on The Hacking Open Source Business Podcast. You can watch the full episode below or continue reading for a recap.
On the Hacking Open Source Business podcast, Joseph Jacks aka JJ (Founder, OSS Capital) joins Avi Press (Founder and CEO, Scarf) and Matt Yonkovit (The HOSS, Scarf) to share what you need to know before starting a commercial open source software (COSS) company and how you can set yourself and your project apart in a way that attracts investor funding. As an investor who exclusively focuses on open source startups, JJ provides a VC perspective on what he looks for when evaluating investment opportunities.
On The Hacking Open Source Business podcast, CEO Chris Molozian and Head of Developer Relations Gabriel Pene at Heroic Labs elaborate on their usage and shift to open source and how it accelerated their adoption.
In this recap of the first episode of the Hacking Open Source Business Podcast, co-hosts Matt Yonkovit and Avi Press, Scarf Founder and CEO, dig into a recent controversy that highlights the challenges open source projects face trying to create sustainable revenue streams to support a business or a non-profit that funds the project’s growth.
Scarf Sessions is a new stream where we have conversations with people shaping the landscape in open source and open source sustainability. This post will give a recap of the conversation Scarf CEO, Avi Press and I had with our guest Stefano Maffulli.
Community is important to the success of open source software. To understand and grow a community, project founders and maintainers need visibility into various technical, social, and even financial metrics. But what metrics should we be using?
Should Python eggs be deprecated in favor of wheels? What does the data show? This post explores how the right data can make decisions like this easier for maintainers and Open Source organizations.
In a new blog post series, we'll highlight great OSS projects that are using Scarf. Today, we are featuring IHP, a modern batteries-included Haskell web framework
Our mission here at Scarf centers around enhancing the connections between open source software maintainers and end users. Learn how Scarf + Nomia can reduce the complexity and increase the efficiency of the end-user open source integration experience.
Today, the most commonly accepted metrics for open source adoption and growth are heavily focused on the contributors and community (the idea is healthy contributions should equate to healthy adoption). While these are useful metrics, they are only part of the picture. This guide is built for those at open-source-based companies who are responsible for growth and adoption.
We’ve got some exciting news: Scarf just launched a powerful, native integration with Salesforce, bringing Scarf’s rich open source usage data directly into your CRM. No more bouncing between tools or setting up S3 data exports—you can now get all the insights you need where you already do your work.
Scarf, a platform designed to provide open-source projects with deeper insights into their users and usage patterns, was the answer ARMO needed. By integrating Scarf into Kubescape, ARMO was able to regain visibility into which company has been using Kubescape, filling the gap left after their CNCF contribution.
Open source software is more than just code. It’s also about the people who create, use, and contribute to it. One of the key factors to the rise of open source software is the power of community. Community is not only a source of users, but also a source of contributors, advocates, evangelists, and potential employees. Community is what gives open source software feedback, validation, trust, and loyalty. It is what makes open source software better and more relevant. But how do you build and maintain a strong and engaged community around your open source product or service? And how do you leverage the community to grow your business and achieve your goals?
Ian Tien (Mattermost’s CEO) explained how building software for free attracted a lot of people who wanted to help the project because they were getting a lot of value out of it. He said: “A lot of people just tend to help you [when you’re building software for free], right? Because they’re getting a lot of value out of it. And it’s not like you’re hard selling them […] You’re building something you love. People respond to the value.”
One of the ways that open source communities demonstrate their power is by organizing themselves and organizing meetups and events to connect with each other and promote their project. Saurav Pathak, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Bagisto, revealed the project’s strategy of creating a global network of ambassadors who organized local events around the product. Bagisto recruited ambassadors from different countries and gave them the resources and support to host local gatherings and spread the word about the product. According to Saurav: “I think it’s a huge success for us that some people are taking initiative and they are actually working around Bagisto and doing these small meetups.”
It becomes evident that building a community around your open source project is a great way to attract contributors, users and supporters. But how do you know if your community is healthy and thriving? How do you measure the impact and value of your community efforts? That’s where metrics come in.
Metrics are quantitative and qualitative indicators that help you track and evaluate the performance and progress of your community. There is no one-size-fits-all way to measure an open source community. Different projects may have different goals, audiences, and challenges. Georg Link, Director of Sales at Bitergia, told us: “Depending on the use case, there are different metrics that I would look at. But the common denominator is the number of contributions and the activity in the project.”
What Investors Want to See in Your Community Metrics:
Investing in open source projects is not the same as investing in traditional software companies. Therefore, investors need to understand the dynamics and health of these communities, as well as the value they generate for the project and its users.
Unlike traditional software companies, open source projects do not have standard metrics such as revenue, profit, or market share. Instead, they have different indicators that reflect their community activity, engagement, growth, diversity, quality, and impact. These indicators can help investors assess the viability, sustainability, and scalability of open source projects, as well as their alignment with their own goals and values.
Jana Iris, investor at TQ Ventures, mentions the metrics she has followed and suggests various metrics such as the amount of activities, the number of posts per week, responses to GitHub issues. She explains that at her previous company, HashiCorp, the goal was to educate and familiarize people with the product, which resulted in signups to their existing learning platform. Jana said: “Of course, each team had its own specific number, like tracking core contributor sentiment over time, tracking ambassador engagement over time, tracking Slack engagement or GitHub discussions. So there's various ways you can look at the health of the project.”
Joseph Jacks, founder and investor at OSS Capital, has a different approach to evaluating open source communities. He believes that the most important metric to look at from an investor’s perspective is growth rate, more specifically the rate of growth of external contributors. He explains that external contributors are the ones who drive adoption, innovation, and value creation for open source projects. However, not all growth metrics are equally interesting or meaningful for Jacks. He says that some metrics, such as the rate of growth of GitHub stars, are not very useful or reliable indicators of community health or value. According to Jacks: “I think that, on its own, it doesn't give you a strong proxy for actual usage and actual adoption.”
Jacks also emphasizes the importance of building relationships with the founders of open source projects as humans, not just as potential investments. He explains: “We, in fact, had to actually have a reasonable sense of conviction well before the creators themselves even had the conviction, which makes it even harder.”
The Most Important Community Metrics to Track, According to the Experts:
If you are running or contributing to an open source community, you may wonder what are the most important metrics to measure its success and impact. However, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Depending on your background, goals and role, you may have different metrics that you prefer or different methods of measuring them. For instance, someone running a foundation may look at metrics very differently than someone looking at it from a sales and marketing perspective. Similarly, someone working in developer relations may have a different perspective than someone working in engineering or product management. In this section, we will compare and contrast the views of these different stakeholders and explore the most important community metrics to track for each of them.
Maxim Wheatly, Head of Global Marketing and Sales at Merico, identifies three metrics that he uses to evaluate the health and performance of their community: “For me, those metrics are Slack growth, new contributors, and retention. They give me insights into discoverability, community growth, and user engagement.“
Although it is beneficial to have clear and specific metrics to measure your community’s success, some experts in the field suggest that numbers are not everything. They argue that there are other aspects of community health and value that cannot be easily quantified or captured by standard indicators.
When it comes to measuring the health and brand recognizability of an open source project, there are several metrics that go beyond numbers and statistics. Kaj Arnö, CEO of the MariaDB Foundation, highlights that by listening to the anecdotes of your friends, family, colleagues, or peers, you can learn about their awareness and understanding of your project. He also advocates mixing both these anecdotes and more concrete metrics to get a more well-rounded picture saying: “Looking at Jira and observing how contributions grow and how they're handled, including votes on Jira items, allows us to understand what people truly desire. Unlike those stars, they do offer valuable assistance.”
Depending on the role and the organization, DevRel professionals may have different goals and objectives. Therefore, it is important to define and measure the right metrics that align with the specific goals and objectives of each role and organization. Patrick McFadin, Developer Advocate at DataStax, revealed that the most meaningful metrics for him revolve mostly around engagement and community contributions such as the number of contributed articles and posted use cases. He says: “After all, you're creating content for people to use, so measuring their usage is important. These metrics can be quite helpful in determining what resonates and what doesn't with the community. By analyzing such data, we can make informed decisions.”
Move Beyond Vanity Metrics and Measure What Really Matters for Your Community:
However, not all metrics are equally meaningful or useful for every project. Some metrics may be misleading or irrelevant, such as GitHub stars, which do not reflect the actual quality, impact, or sustainability of a project.
GitHub stars are a simple way to show appreciation or interest in a project, but they do not indicate how many people are actually using, contributing to, or benefiting from it. GitHub stars can also be easily manipulated or inflated by bots, campaigns, or incentives. Therefore, relying too much on such so-called “vanity metrics'' as a measure of success can be counterproductive or deceptive.
Joe Karlsson, Developer Advocate at Tinybird, suggested that it’s also important to have in mind the “why” of tracking specific metrics and checking if it aligns with the business goals. About this, he said: “I think it affects the quality or what you're doing with that content too. You could do something that's salesy and really push hard to convert people, but it may turn people away or push them to sign up for GitHub stars and forget that your community isn't growing”
Conclusion
In this blog, we have explored how to measure the success of your open source community. We have seen that community is a key factor for the growth and impact of open source software, and that metrics can help you track and evaluate your community’s health and value. We have heard from experts in the field who shared their insights and experiences on how they use metrics to build and maintain strong and engaged communities around their open source projects.
We hope that this blog has given you some useful tips and ideas on how to measure your own open source community’s success. Remember that metrics are not an end in themselves, but a means to an end. They are tools that can help you understand your community better, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and improve its performance and impact. However, metrics are not everything. They cannot capture the human and social aspects of community, such as trust, loyalty, passion, and collaboration. These are the intangible qualities that make open source communities unique and powerful. Therefore, while you use metrics to measure your community’s success, don’t forget to also celebrate your community’s spirit.
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