Analysis of user and developer activity

We recently had two jubilee numbers - 5000 users in the social network group VKontakte and the 6000th OS build. Since the group vk.com/kolibri_os appeared relatively recently and is growing rapidly, it is obvious that soon the number of participants in this group will overtake the number of builds. And this means that we need to understand what our project is active and who our users are. And here we remembered that 3 years ago a unique socio-psychological experiment began, about which, among other things, we will tell in this article.


On January 28, 2013, 2 groups were simultaneously created in social networks: international Facebook and CISN VKontakte. By experience, it became clear that the psychology of the participants of social networks is radically different :
Admin group VKontakte Leency :

Dima and I decided to conduct an experiment on my initiative - to make the VC group closed, as a result, a complete failure, no one entered the group in half a day before 13.30 Kyiv time. Although usually I cut in the note and saw about 6 newcomers. After opening from 13.30 to 16.00 - 2 people.

Admin of the Facebook group yogev_ezra :

Almost no one entered the open group. There was no profit (and so everything was clear). And as soon as he closed - they began to join more. To learn the news for free.

Thus, both openness and closeness of a group can stimulate joining it. In this article we will discuss other experimental results, and also consider the following indicators:
* Facebook group activity www.facebook.com/groups/kolibrios . Group type - closed.
* activity of the new VKontakte group (before this was the old group vk.com/club420370 ). Group type - open.
* traffic site kolibrios.org . Group type - open.
* habrahabr.ru/company/kolibrios blog traffic. Group type - open.
* Attendance of an article on Wikipedia ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/KolibriOS . Group type - open.
* activity of members of the forum board.kolibrios.org . Type of "group" - open.
* developer activity. Type of "group" - conditionally open. Lay out the program, it will be tested and thrown into SVN, you will be given access to fill in the following edits.
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These indicators depend on the growth factors of our groups:
1. the spread of the Internet as a whole;
2. distribution of information about KolibriOS;
3. internationalization;
4. craving for exotic;
5. gradual improvement of the operating system;
6. desire to assist in the development of KolibriOS, including programming;
7. type of group in a social network;
8. seasonal.

Therefore, we first discuss the factors, and then we will show some interesting graphs.

The first factor is the spread of the Internet as a whole. The graph shows the proportion of Internet users per 100 inhabitants in three sets (residents of developed countries, developing countries and the world as a whole) according to the International Telecommunications Union.


The second factor is the dissemination of information about KolibriOS. Our polls ( on the forum , in the VKontakte group ) show that in recent years the majority of newbies come from Habrahabr! In particular, we note the effect of the publication of articles in this blog - up to 150 people at a time . A Google test shows that KolibriOS is 1.75 times more pages on the Internet than MenuetOS.

If you look at the third factor, a few years ago we had an assembly in only 2 languages. We have done some work on internationalization. First we did a survey about the languages ​​our users speak and at the moment we are producing builds in 5 languages : English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Estonian. Could be released in some other languages, but in general for a long time localization was blocked by the problem with fonts . The project site kolibrios.org is now available in 7 languages: English, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, French.

The fourth factor is the craving for exotic. For example, Jeditobe once wrote about us , and now in the camp of ReactOS supporters.

The fifth factor is the improvement of the OS - we are actively fixing bugs, updating drivers and the network stack, adding new programs.

The sixth factor is the desire to help in the development of KolibriOS, or to make special software based on it. We have already written about the practical application of KolibriOS and a special version of Kolibri-A . The survey results show that up to 24% of participants are ready to develop programs right away, another 50% want to learn how to program (the survey is visible to members of the group).

The seventh factor is the type of group in the social network.
Three years ago, our participants decided to make an experiment with different types of groups in social networks and here are the results:
* The closed Facebook group has grown to 700 participants, including an increase in the first half to 350, and over the next 2.5 years the number of participants doubled (if the growth rate were constant, it would increase 5 times). Conclusion: the growth rate of the participants decreases, apparently also due to the fact that participants from different countries and without having common friends cannot recommend KolibriOS to each other. Also about KolibriOS not much news in the Western media. We will take this into account ...
* an open group of VKontakte grew to 5,300 participants, including an increase in the first six months to 1,400, and over the next 2.5 years the number of participants increased 3.8 times. Conclusion: the growth rate of participants decreases, but in general is much higher than in the Facebook group. Over the last month, 3,056 unique users visited the group, i.e. about 60% of group members track news.

The eighth factor is seasonal. In principle, many people rested this month, so we can expect an increase in the activity of users and developers.

Some other statistics of the VKontakte group:
The demographics of the participants shows that interest in KolibriOS is for all age groups. Women are less interested in us than men.

16 countries with the most participants. They have 4,700 participants, i.e. 88.6% of the entire group.

20 cities with the largest number of participants. They have 2125 participants, that is, 40% of the entire group.

Interestingly, Krasnodar has bypassed many million-plus cities.

Site Attendance
There is no actual data yet ( Clevermouse is busy adding support for the PE format ), according to 3 years ago - 23-25 ​​thousand unique visitors per month .

Blog Attendance
On average, a blog is visited by 150 people every day during periods when there are no publications. During publication periods, the traffic to articles in our blog increases to 10 thousand. Over the last 2 years, the number of blog subscribers has doubled from 275 to 550+.

Wikipedia article attendance
The number of views per day: Russian Wikipedia - about 100, English - about 60, in other Wikipedia the numbers are about an order of magnitude lower. All these are newcomers, that is, at least 60 thousand people a year learn about KolibriOS from Wikipedia.

Membership Activity
The forum registered 1,670 people who left 57,950 messages in 2,217 topics (not counting deleted messages and topics that are also decent). This is less than 10 messages per commit in SVN, which is not so bad, because sometimes the responses to new programs and the results of testing driver versions take up several pages.
The 50 most active forum participants left 39019 messages, i.e. more than 67.3%.


Developer Activity

Findings:

All 8 factors affect the attendance of pages dedicated to KolibriOS. There are quite strong factors that we cannot influence (the spread of the Internet, the craving for exotic, seasonal), but there are also those that we plan to do. For example, while writing this article on Wikipedia, an article appeared in Catalan, written by one of our foreign participants .