publish analytics data

[chadwhitacre]

As part of being an open company, we need to publish our analytics data. We shouldn't have any marketing analytics that aren't also available to the public.

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[chadwhitacre]

+2 from @ericholscher and @greggles in IRC.

in google analytics you can make a read only view of the data and then make the credentials with access to that "well known"
not sure GA would be happy about that practice :)
and probably causes other problems :(
there's a GA API you could scrape and publish some relevant things

[chadwhitacre]

Either we use an existing service and try scrape and publish data from there, or we run/roll our own service so that we can publish everything.

We are using GA and Gaug.es right now. Today I learned about https://segment.io/, which abstracts 50+ existing analytics services. It's at least a good catalog of options. The problem with this route is that then we aren't publishing everything. It's also likely to be a fair bit of work to extract the info we want from these systems.

http://piwik.org/ is the open-source analytics option. It, ya know, sucks, from a UI pov. Maybe we can use it for collection? Again, a chunk of work. Run/rolling our own would essentially be a revival of #1497.

Either route we go, let's look at exposing info on a Librato dashboard. We're starting to use Librato for other dashboard-y things (issue queues, app monitoring), and we should try to use platforms we already use if we can.

[chadwhitacre]

Dropping from Infrastructure in order to move that milestone closer to completion. Leaving open to revisit in a future milestone.

[chadwhitacre]

The conversation to date about whether to avoid Google Analytics for privacy reasons is over on #761.

[patcon]

Of all the things, this is something I'm totally game to help with

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @Thelle over at gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#16 (comment).

[patcon]

Investigating this. Posting here for posterity:
https://github.com/googleanalytics/google-analytics-super-proxy

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I suspect it makes more sense to just pipe data through a metrics abstraction lib like segment.io, and start using a service that allows easy public dashboards, similar to how we're using librato (no need to even ditch GA, per se). Building a solution specifically around GA seems awkward and locks us into over-valuing GA

[chadwhitacre]

Heard from @neilanders0n on Twitter and in private email:

Currently I am working on an analytics platform called Regard (www.withregard.io, https://github.com/with-regard).

Regard is the only analytics platform that collects usage data transparently and treats your users with respect. I believe that Gittip is leading the way in promoting transparency, could you spare some time to talk to me about how Regard might truly represent that same ideal?

The platform is open source and the data is owned by the user who created it. They can see the same views as the product developers and even remove their data if they are not happy with what is being collected. We believe that if you are only interested in making your product better, improving it so that you can really thrill your users, then you don't need any personal information. All you need is data that shows how users interact with your product so you can make informed decisions. It would be wonderful to get your insights into what else would make Regard great, more open, more trustworthy etc.

@patcon @clone1018 Have you seen this before? Looks good to me at first blush, want to look into it further?

[eneiand]

Hi all, thanks for bringing this chat to my attention @whit537. We're in very early stages at the moment so would love to get your insights as to how Regard could work functionally, politically etc. The other team members and I will keep an eye on this conversation for anything you want to discuss and @whit537 and I are going to arrange a call to chat further.

[rohitpaulk]

+1 on making analytics data public.

[chadwhitacre]

Piwik is coming along nicely. In #3244 I'm proposing that we start trialling it for #761. If we switch to Piwik then we have two possibilities for publishing analytics data:

• Set up a read-only account so that anyone can login to our Piwik and use the dashboard directly. This would only work if we satisfied ourselves that absolutely zero PII could make it into the dashboard.
• Use the Pwiki API to publish custom reports.

[chadwhitacre]

Piwik makes it really easy to allow anon to view:

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃