[TOS] Help put Research Minion Mel to work - what do you want to measure?

[Mel Chua]

I went to a workshop today about project management, and one of the 
things they talked about there that stuck with me was the importance of 
keeping weekly statistics (how did that saying go, "you improve what you 
measure")? The only trouble was that I wasn't quite sure what to measure 
for TOS - the stats we keep now 
(http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_stats#The_data) are on 
the order of a year.

So I mocked up a few things. My apologies for the color scheme. And then 
I figured I'd ask folks if the displays I was first inspired to make 
would actually be the most useful ones to track:

http://mchua.fedorapeople.org/tos-scorecard/publications.png
http://mchua.fedorapeople.org/tos-scorecard/ambassadors.png

Other things I could think about measuring:

* number of classes that had a post on planet TOS (from the professor or 
one or more students) this week
* number of people attending each POSSE module 
(http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_modules) online
* I started drawing blanks at this point, and went "wait, no, SURELY 
there must be a TON of valuable stuff to measure, the problems should be 
narrowing it down!"

What do you folks think? What statistics would you like to see on a 
weekly TOS scorecard, if there were only... say... 3 of them?

Separate but related question: What would you want on a dashboard for 
your TOS class - what sort of research, teaching, performance, etc. data 
for any reason (student grading, class monitoring, an FIE paper, 
whatever) would you like delivered to you weekly, and at the end of the 
semester of the class in a beautifully formatted report *and* a workable 
data dump? Blog posts? Git commits? Mailing list statistical analysis? 
Meeting log keyword search? Number of FOSS community members your 
students reported engaging with each week? This is particularly 
pertinent for those of you coming to POSSE this summer, because that's 
what you're going to be getting during the school year while you're 
teaching your classes.

Yes, I am sort of semi-sneakily asking people to help me design the 
research gruntwork I can do for all of you for free. I figured I might 
as well get used to it, I'm going to be a grad student soon. ;)

--Mel