Meeting Attendee Count

Question: How many people are attending our virtual or in-person meetings?

Description

Many open source projects host regular operational or community meetings to collaborate in a more synchronous way. These meetings include live virtual and in-person and may coincide with conference events. This metric aims to measure the number of people attending these meetings.

Objectives

Collaborating synchronously through virtual or in-person meetings can accelerate project progress and give space for easier discussion about complex topics. By supplementing asynchronous communication with synchronous meetings, a project can be more inclusive and offer a wider range of opportunities and outlets for people to join and contribute to the community.

By tracking trends around how many people are attending these meetings, a project can gauge the level of community interaction and engagement. Additionally, if the project has different types of meetings, one can track what areas of the project are most attractive to contributors and community members. They can also track region via participation at different meetings.

• Low or decreasing attendance in meetings may signal:
• Interest in the project is decreasing
• The meeting time should be more inclusive of global time zones
• The meeting itself could be more inclusive through its agenda or facilitation
• A certain area of the project needs more support from the community
• The tool being used to host the meeting is not easy for people to access and use
• Potential attendees can’t find information about when meetings happen or how to connect
• People in your community may simply prefer asynchronous communication

Conversely, high or increasing attendance at meetings may signal:

• The community is growing and vibrant
• People feel comfortable participating synchronously
• Meeting agendas and topics are interesting for community members
• There may be topics that can be discussed asynchronously but are brought to meetings
• People can generally find information about meetings and connect easily

Considerations for Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) within meetings:

• Synchronous meetings may be less inclusive due to geographic location, language, and time differences
• There is potential for a small few to dominate the meetings, and actually harm inclusivity

There is no right or wrong answer with regard to the perfect number of attendees at meetings, and more is not necessarily better, but keeping track of attendance can help communities gain more insight into how their community members interact.

Implementation

Filters

• Trends over time (month to month, year to year)
• Day of Week
• Time of Day
• Type of meeting (if the project hosts more than one type of meeting)
• Agenda / topics

Tools Providing the Metric

For virtual meetings, many projects use tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Jitsi, Microsoft Teams, or Big Blue Button. These tools often provide a mechanism for tracking the number of attendees, if one is logged in to an account with appropriate access.

Data Collection Strategies

Links on how to obtain this data are below.

• Zoom
• Google Meet
• Microsoft Teams
• Big Blue Button

References

Related CHAOSS metrics:

• Chat Platform Inclusivity
• Global Time Inclusivity

Known Contributors

• Elizabeth Barron
• Dawn Foster
• Kevin Lumbard
• Matt Germonprez
• Vinod Ahuja

The usage and dissemination of health metrics may lead to privacy violations. Organizations may be exposed to risks. These risks may flow from compliance with the GDPR in the EU, with state law in the US, or with other laws. There may also be contractual risks flowing from terms of service for data providers such as GitHub and GitLab. The usage of metrics must be examined for risk and potential data ethics problems. Please see CHAOSS Data Ethics document for additional guidance.