People didn’t even know about mysql planet! Is it over their heads, even if they did know about it?
User Activity — blogging and Developer Activity — blogging, patches
Some metrics in place now, blogs that mention MySQL, etc. What about experts-exchange.com, or sitepoint.com?
How do we measure community, how do we define the communities?
How do we know how our community is growing or shrinking?
Scoreboard Idea: have and opt-in to have a program that will send info to MySQL every so often.
issues: How do you get people to opt-in? Could be easy for Windows users. Getting stats from installations — incentive is that companies can see their own specific stuff, voluntary of course.
Other metrics — days to patch
Who are our community users???
1) enslistments in scoreboard
2) # patches
3) # blog entries
4) # forum posts
Easy API for: # of posts, # of posts solved? What can we offer sites like sitepoint.com and experts-exchange.com to get that data?
Privacy policy….what is it? make sure it’s moderated, so user can choose what to send, what not to send. ANYNONYMOUS.
What are the groups of users and how can we reach them?
How can services be advertised and marketed appropriately?
Simple enough for neophyte.
How much time was used in setting up the system rather than actually doing what they need? How can that be measured? Download and “powered by” timestamp….
Should we work with open source software like joomla! or drupal or phpmyadmin?
How can non-technical (or less-technical) people have a place to gather?
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What about hosting companies like Dreamhost?
Can you use google code search to find programs using mysql?
Technorati, slashdot, digg, delicio.us, etc. google blog search?
Surveys — what other dbs have you considered? what made you decide to download mysql? what kinds of people do you think could do what you did? (ie, your mother with no technical skills, etc). contest? maybe at the end of an installation of open source software? Maybe a yearly census type thing?
Blogs are a great thing, because lots of non-techie users use mysql. Also web-based services, do the users know they’re using mysql? do we care? blogspot and lj, stuff like that. You can download lj code if you want….but do we care about folks just using lj on the site…?
Referral program? Tell a friend how easy it was to install MySQL?
Servoy and db4free.net
Who’s using MySQL? What are they using it for? Where are they (location)? These are all categories…