Authors: @aar0n @paulapivat
Intro/Context
The Analytics Guild is focused on making activity metrics more accessible to the DAO. We want to spark a discussion on existing metrics, what they mean, nuances in their interpretation and figure out which ones stand out to the community.
This will allow us to iterate on existing metrics, provide guidance as we build out newer dashboards and launch other analytically-driven initiatives.
Through this conversation, we are hoping to both inform the community the nuances in existing metrics and their interpretation, while getting a better understanding of what the community wants.
We often get variations of the following questions:
How engaged are contributors in the DAO?
Who are the active contributors in the DAO?
Do you know how many active members are in X Guild?
Do you have any way of tracking user engagement in our specific channels?
You might notice the questions get progressively more specific.
There are several ways to analyze activity levels at the DAO. We have in mind several paths forward, but first, a summary of existing metrics. You may have seen some of these from our previous presentation.
Engagement
- Discord New Joiners, Activations, Retention and Engagement
- Total Discord Members
- Messaging & Voice Activity
Description: These metrics are provided by Discord and provide a DAO-as-a-whole perspective on discord membership growth and engagement. While they provide a big picture perspective, they do not provide insights into the activity within guilds, projects or channels.
POAPs Claimed
Description: This chart shows POAPs claimed for past community calls. We could argue members taking the time to claim POAPs is a unit of “activity”. There are more POAPs handed out for guild/project meetings not captured here.
Snapshot Votes
Description: As we saw with our most recent snapshot, voting is a crucial activity that indicates the governance health of a DAO. Because Snapshot votes are generally reserved for substantial decisions, often with financial implications, it does not capture other voting activities that may happen in the forums, guilds or channels.
Capital Allocation
- Funding for Guilds / Projects
- Bounties
Description: Guilds and Project funding provide a measure of activity at the aggregate level, while bounty board metrics here provide Seasonal comparisons.
Community Recognition
- Coordinape Distributions
- Tipping
Description: Similarly to metrics above, these numbers show aggregate activity for BanklessDAO as a whole.
While the aforementioned ‘aggregate’ metrics provide a view of activity for BanklessDAO as a whole, they do not shed light into who are most active or activity within guilds, projects or specific channels. Our hypothesis is that when people want data on active contributors, they want to understand contributors activity in specific context.
In your day-to-day work at the DAO, you are interested in contributor activity at the:
- Guild level
- Project level (i.e., activity in Website, Bounty Board, DAO Dash etc)
- Channel-specific level (i.e., activity in dev-general, edu-general, writer-general etc.,)
- Contributor level (e.g., guest pass, level 1, level 2 etc.,)
- BANK holding level (e.g., 10k - 35k, 35k - 150k etc., )
- DAO-as-a-whole level
This poll will allow us to provide the proper scope and context for our activity metrics. For example, if we want to know active contributors in the Writers Guild, it might make sense to start with the total sample of BanklessDAO contributors who have the Writers Guild tag. Then from that number, build out various activity metrics. That would be a different question from activity levels among Guest Pass holders.
Moreover, we may want activity over time.
In your work at the DAO, are you interested in contributor activity levels over the following time periods:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Seasonally
- Time since they joined the server
- Time since last touch point (e.g., days since last message)
If there’s a context we’re missing, please comment below! 
With clarity around time and level, we can direct our attention to various activity metrics.
When you think of “active” contributors, which of the following metrics would you be most interested in?
- Number of messages sent (count)
- Speaking minutes (% time spent unmuted in a voice channel)
- Amount of Tips Sent and/or Received
- Coordinape Rounds participated
- Days since latest touchpoint (messages, voice)
- Days inactive
- Days since joined
- Snapshot Proposals Voted For
- POAPs claimed
- Bounties created, claimed, submitted or reviewed
While it’ll require several metrics to get a complete picture of a contributor’s activity levels, we are interested to learn what kind of metric the community finds meaningful.
By gathering feedback on what you are looking for and having the community aligned on how activity can be measured for the groups above, the Analytics Guild can focus on standardizing the reporting of these metrics. The respective stakeholders in the DAO will have these metrics/dashboards for use, which can inform decision making for the DAO as a whole, specific Guild, or Project, etc as needed.
Existing Dashboards
In fact, many of the metrics mentioned above already exist and we encourage the community to check them out, including:
Guild & Project Membership Dashboard
(developed by @RunTheJewelz ) link: https://daodash.xyz/superset/dashboard/21/
This dashboard features metrics like:
- Days since latest touchpoint
- Days since joined
- Message Count
- Contributor Level
Discord Roles - Time Series Analysis
(developed by @aar0n ) link: https://daodash.xyz/superset/dashboard/37/
Guild Weekly Active Members
(developed by @paulapivat ) link: https://daodash.xyz/superset/dashboard/39/?native_filters=()
As mentioned above, to get a sense for active contributors in a specific guild, it makes sense to get the total number of contributors with a specific guild tag, with the Writer’s Guild features here as an example.
We could then segment the population by latest touchpoint (shout out to @JokerDelMar for creating this metric)
We may also want total messages sent in the past 7-days by guild tag holders or, even more granular, messages sent by guild tag holders in a guild-specific channel.
Finally, tips received by guild tag holders provides another view of contributor activity.
We appreciate everyone’s feedback, and look forward to sharing valuable insights with the DAO on a more continuous basis. Please don’t hesitate to hop in Analytics and share your thoughts as well.