Stats

Discussion
1

Has much making has being going on in the Makerspace?

This was a topic of discussion and disagreement during an aside on a recent thread.
TomN posts useful information about membership stats, but I have not seen any stats about
usage of the space.
I think we should post stats from our rfid, as well as actually regularly polling members on productivity in the space in terms of making.
Rather then being unnecessary bureaucracy, I think if we make an effort to develop our culture of self research and data driven introspection, then it would allow for better informed, quicker discussions and as as an side effect asking asking members during stat/opinion collection would really help making members feel involved, and they might be more likely to get involved in running
maintaining the space.

I am happy to help with coding to help process data, and happy to help with collection info from members.

I understand we should avoid inflating @roles and becoming too officious, but I think good info would decrease decision making times, arguments and help us make better decisions
@stats ?

2

If you want to have a quick stab at something, I could give you exports of the doorbot logs?

It’s a series of .json files, one for each day, each one full of entries like this:

 {
        "type": "message",
        "user": "USLACKBOT",
        "text": "Tom Newsom opened the door.",
        "ts": "1466010104.000004"
    },

ts is the time/date in UNIX epoch http://www.epochconverter.com/

Reckon you could do interesting things with that data?

Anything more complex, you’d need to liaise with @unknowndomain

3

A lot of the activitie on the log will be making the space.

And we sill have a lot of work to do.

Just saying

4

I’ve been here four months. Here every Saturday and Sunday and Wednesday (implicitly discounting exceptions).

I ve seen verity working on her bike.
Barnaby making a steady cam.
Some people using the laser cutter for about 30 minutes before it breaks again.

That’s it.

There is 5% making at most.

The rest of it is building. Blood sweet and tears type back breaking exhausting unpaid building work that leaves your body broken and soul alive.

1 Like
5

cool, but before we try and do anything I’m not sure how much of the ideas mooted would be wanted or used.

As an example, two simple scenarios/two opposing cases.
First, wider membership who don’t use the space much/rarely, with a core group
who make decisions and prob use the space much more.
Second, a flatter distribution, with a higher percentage of people using the space and prob a wider participation in decision making, and more people with more input.

In the first example, I think trying to get wider opinions will be hard and prob not relevant to the decision making process much, might even be resisted by those making decisions since it would mean loss of individual control.

In the second it would be useful in my opinion.

there are in between situations as well in these two extremes.

1 Like
6

My hunch is that the distribution of “engagement” is something like this, which I just quickly graphed the “no. of visits” stat from https://discourse.southlondonmakerspace.org/users?period=quarterly

EDIT: Here’s a better version so you can see everyone’s names (go to Chart1)

Click here

7

Hi All

I do love a good graph.

I noticed that we have actually five enclosing sets of members:

  1. Directors
  2. Those whose tags open shutter
  3. Those whose tags open door
  4. Those who have tags
  5. Those who have direct debit

Can I ask how many of each there are? Was thinking about engagement model.

Best regards,
Jonathan.

8

Hi Tom (N) – could I see the data? Thanks. Jonathan.

9

I’ve seen a lot more than that going on.

10

We don’t have access to this data.

11

Some context and examples would be good otherwise the comment doesn’t really mean anything.

I can only describe what I’ve seen. I’m not omni-present.

Thanks again for nullifying my input with a knee jerk reply. Its starting to become abusive[?]

12

thats interesting graph, sorry for being thick, is quarterly, a three month period?
Is the y-axis the number of visits for a single user over that period, seems like the highest
number of visits is about 93 so doesn’t look like an average to me?
thanks

13

Well back to the point Conner made.

What stats would you like to see available Conner?

Describe the vision you had in a bit more detail (even if it’s not technically possible it’s worth hearing the idea)

14

93 is the maximum possible visits between 16/03/16 and 16/06/16 (one each day)

Anyone who joined within those 6 months will be under-represented, but the graph has a similar (albiet more stepped) shape if you reduce the window to a month.

Pasted image1001×539 32 KB

15

PS: Of 119 active members, 111 have a Discourse account, of which 75 visited Discourse at least once last week.

16

Hey
It seems like we have alot of potential with the rfid system and discourse in terms of stats.
But I guess longer term we should only keep producing stats that we end up finding useful.

Easy enough stuff like mean visits to space from members. Mean number of visits to discourse.
Mean contributions to discourse.

And it would be great if we had some way of tracking the number of finished projects in the space, bit Im not sure how to effect this. Or maybe number of ongoing projects in the space?

What do other people think.

17

yeah that latest graph is very informative.
Something like that for space visits would be cool and would go alot of the way towards answering the previous point of discussion about weather there is making going on. Since we know who is doing the physical work, then other people are prob working on their own stuff?

Longer term, after building, I guess if we got people visiting then they are making??

18

also, in my opinion, and i realise there is no right opinion here, flatter graphs with a wider distribution in terms of discourse and space visits mean more wider involvement by members, and
to my mind a stronger makerspace/community.

19

True. After the build it will be helpful.
We may even be able to add data from the tool control to see what is being used.

Is it a little big brother and beaurcratic though? (Playing devils advocate).

If your interested in it though I would say we should encourage that. It could be an interesting project.
What can we lose from doing it?

Is it the right time? Ild like to see as much brain and muscle power getting the space functioning as our current priority.

20

Right back at the beginning, Tom and I thought it would be cool to have a little thing that said “Hey, you only visited twice last month. What’s up?” or “Wow you were here evey night last week. Thanks for coming!”

I dunno really how useful or actually pleasant it would be. “Really, only twice? Not getting much for my £20 am I? Think I’ll cancel.” or “Oh god I’m an addict. Better destroy my access fob.”