Understanding those who make up our community can be a difficult task. There are plenty of tools that give us counts or present folks who are new to the community, but very few tools give actual insight into what kind of participation members of your community are doing or where they stand in the spectrum of participation.

Peritus is looking to change that with Community Segments.

‍What are Community Segments

‍The first step into understanding the makeup of a community is internalizing the concept that a community is in fact a large group of individuals. These individuals will have different motivations, skill-levels, and reasons for being a part of the community.

With Community Segments, it’s easy to see how your community breaks down. When it comes to skill level, we want to know who is new to the community and who has been pushing forward consistently. We might want to take a look at where our top performers were over time. All this is possible in Peritus dashboards.‍

What are Contribution Metrics

‍With the understanding of where our community members are in their journey in a general sense, it’s important to also see where folks are contributing overall.

Beyond seeing what contributions have been made, we can see an engagement rating and where the activity is taking place. In this way we can see where we are succeeding in building connections and programs and where we need to better focus our efforts.

Often we only see this kind of direct participation by count - how many people answered questions in Slack or Mattermost, how many Github Issues were responded to. This doesn’t give us the clearest picture. We need information, not just data.

‍Community Intelligence

‍We’ve talked before about Community Intelligence, but here we are referring to something slightly different. Here we are talking about knowing exactly what our community members are doing and why they are motivated to engage in the activities we are examining.

Until now, gathering this intelligence has been piecemeal and required a good deal of manual collection. We would need to spend massive amounts of time grabbing data from various sources, collate that data to make it useful information, and finally put a cohesive narrative around our activities. This would take away from participating in the communities we are a part of.

With Peritus’ profiling ability, we can collect this information and present it in easy to use dashboard so we can focus on the activities that best showcase our products and organizations to the community.

‍Conclusion

‍While gaining data is important, it pales in comparison to having actionable information about the people and communities working with us. Our participation in these communities, as managers, organizers, or just citizens, requires Community Intelligence to better engage and understand where our successes can be found.

Peritus continues to work to bring that actionable information to DevRel teams to meet their needs and to assist the other teams we work with internally. In this way, we can ensure we meet the needs of our communities, both internal and external.