The state of the community
Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2016 7:57 pm
The recent voting in the thread next door made me think about some ways to estimate the current state of the community. Of course, any such estimation would be hugely inaccurate and fuzzy to begin with, however, I still find it interesting -- it at least gives us some idea about where we are and how effective our actions have been so far -- and which ones of them it would be the most beneficial to focus on. So here are some simple attempts off the top of my head:
- The kickstarter campaign had 1,399 backers -- those are people who paid at least $10 to have the project happen, so they have at least some skin in the game. No idea how many of them actually participate in the community in any way.
- The feature voting during the kickstarter collected 1037 responses. Those are the people, from among the previous group, who bothered to click on a link in their e-mail and make a choice.
- This sub-forum has 319 topics, started by 169 different users. Many of those are just "ask and run" one-shots, though, and many active users don't really start new threads, but rather prefer to respond to existing threads.
- I have no easy way to get to other activity statistics, but perhaps the forum admins do and could add to this.
- The poll in the neighboring thread has 23 votes total so far.
- A few months ago I ran a contest on hackaday.io for projects using MicroPython on the esp8266. Through the month, only 6 people submitted projects that qualified.
- Searching the hackaday.io for "MicroPython ESP8266", and excluding my own projects, I can see 20 projects. 8 of them are from the aforementioned contest.
- Over the last two years I ran 4 different hardware workshops with groups of about 20 people each. I keep contact with the people who participated, and as far as I know, none of them actually started a project using MicroPython.
- There are 24 issues tagged with esp8266 open on github, 72 closed. No idea by how many people.
- Any other ways to gauge the size of our small group?