+1 for your post Tom - Does Liferay ever get Facebook Likes and Google+ +1 or do I have to contribute my hack? ;)
It's mostly about relations, as you stated.
But why? Because you get a get (or want to get) a quicker response to your problem.
I "used" some of the Liferay guys as a shourtcut to some of my problems. And it worked (Thanks to Julio, Juan and Igor).

In the end it is all about getting helped, or did I get something wrong?

Thanks for your +1 I think the "Liferay-guys-shortcut" is one of great features that community could provide - nice point


Yes, when you are using forums. But this doesn't apply when you write a wiki page, for example.


I think it's not end but start For example me - I'm in group B and this is not my motivation, but for those who decide to help (to move from A to B ) it can be interesting. That's why I think this is start

I think it's more complex than just doing everything to get quicker response. We need to find the fundamental cause we could work with Some vision / purpose that others would like to share. And if I understand it well, we can't use Autonomy as motivation (it's too indiviual ), Mastery takes long time and big effort. So there is only Purpose we can work with And here we need to find shared purpose - cause not an effect - that all shares. Then we will (maybe ) know what can we build on. But maybe it's me who's missing something here now

-- tom

Wow your input makes me wander on whole new tracks.

So types A. are people who did not decide on their own to go with Liferay?!

Maybe that supports the few statistics we have on Liferay Contributors.
We have now exactly ( these figures are strange? are these based on % of threads !?)
10 Liferay Legends
20 Liferay Masters
40 Experts
140 Regular Members
16000+ Junior and new members

So not even 1,3% of the members has a higher rank than Junior. (still counting Lisa Simpson and Brett Randall, where have they gone?!)

We should ask James F. for some additional statistics, we could do good things with those, maybe pop a question(poll) every now and then on this subject,
to really grasp this idea who is participating now.
Maybe find some data from other FOSS projects to compare.

Isn't that what it is all abaout?
Getting new ideas, new points of view....
I like such constructive discussions.
The exchange of opinions.

Interesting. Haven't thought this way, but yes - you are right. They doesn't have such privileges in company to judge whether to use Liferay or not. It's always manager/architect who decide and developers that have to fight. And therefore they are not always excited as they could be

The stats are really strange. But as I can see in the forum there are not all threads from past. The oldest thread in English Development is from November 2, 2007. I suppose these stats are counted also just from these threads.

I agree - we need more accurate information/stats. But are we able to aim the group A? As I see from polls there are tens of votes. But we need thousands.
Maybe some kind of more aggressive poll would help - e.g. modal poll you can skip, but still obtrusive.

Now I've remembered a talk I've had with my colleage a few months ago. It was something like this: Liferay community is also different from other OSS communities, because there are just several Liferay hostings (we all know why - it's because of java). So (to compare with Drupal/Joomla/... and other PHP communities) most of Liferay sites are corporate. Maybe that's another insight to: why there is only 200 > Junior members . We simply don't have typical OS users, because almost nobody use Liferay on his own.
But I'm just guessing. We need more stats

-- tom

I do

Me too. And I even provide hosting for friends and their friends.

Speaking as the architect that made the decision in my pond, there is this separation. I found Liferay, I evaluated what it had to offer, and I brought it in-house. The rest of the developers accepted it, but I can't say they ever really got behind it at all. One guy really struggles w/ the whole hibernate/spring/liferay stack (he longs for the day when a complete program existed within a single source file).



Well, Liferay isn't pushed as a CMS, a templating system, a single administrator system, ... It's not pushed for developers like ruby on rails or any of the other frameworks/stacks.

Liferay is what it is. And for most people who don't know better, Liferay is just a portal w/ a bunch of separate windows arranged on a single browser page.

While there are some of us that use Liferay on our own, I think we'd all say it is not the easiest stack to get up and running, even if you're just hosting your own blog or something. There are many other easier and faster to implement frameworks available for those tasks.

Hi,

I've computed some stats of Liferay.com forums. It's based on 16491 users, 49258 threads and 174402 messages.

Some numbers (average computed for last 12 months):
* There are 14180 unanswered threads total, 258 each month without any answer
* 874 threads are created each month by 544 users & there are 399 users that every month answer 546 foreign threads
* => 70 threads are answered by owner or *BUMP*ing

Results for threads
* 3 threads have exactly 100 messages
* 2635 threads have 10 - 100 messages
* 47209 threads have <= 10 messages
* 47209 threads have <= 10 messages
* 40993 threads have <= 5 messages
* 11018 threads have exactly 2 messages
* 14180 threads have just 1 messages - the question

Results for user-messages:
* exactly 10 users have more than 1000 messages
* 215 users created 100 - 1000 messages
* 16266 users created <= 100 messages
* 13714 users created <= 10 messages
* 11693 users created <= 5 messages
* 5439 users have just one message

Results for user-threads:
* New threads were created only by 13522 users
* 7 users created more than 100 threads
* 896 users created 10 - 100 threads
* 12619 users created <= 10 threads
* 11508 users created <= 5 threads
* 6646 users created just one thread (5173 of them have own messages only in one thread)

Results for: how many users responded to someone else's thread:
* 8188 users responded to someone else's thread
* 4 users responded in more than 1000 threads
* 75 users responded in 100 - 1000 threads
* 8109 users responded in <= 100 threads
* 7532 users responded in <= 10 threads
* 6986 users responded in <= 5 threads
* 4372 users responded in 1 thread (1866 of them have just 1 message)

Is it sufficient?

-- tom

This is where stats can be twisted to suit any purpose. We could argue, based on these numbers, that there are a lot of questions that go unanswered, that people in the community are not being helpful, that they are not giving back to the community at all...

For the past few months, I've been hitting (for the most part) only those posts where there have been no replies, and answering those I feel comfortable answering.

I can tell you that many of these kinds of posts are too generic (i.e. "what is Liferay?" was one that came up not too long ago), are too specialized to a specific user (i.e. "I have my own authentication mechanism, how to I change out Liferay's with mine?" is not something common that many users would have had experience doing), but many of them are easily answered if the posters had simply RTFM (I hate saying that because I know it sounds very harsh).

To get back on topic, I don't think you can just use the number of unanswered threads as a statistic with any value; I think you'd have to include an analysis of those unanswered threads to categorize them somehow.

If you can strip out the generic questions, the specialized questions, and the RTFM questions, I think you'd find that there are very few unanswered threads in the forum.

I vote for some anonymous questionnaire. Something short but useful. We need to understand our community better.

Another story for better understanding of OUR motivation:
At the very beginning I was type A (I came to company which build solutions on Liferay - it was 4.3 in that times) but as a time passed I "felt in love" with Liferay. And here I am. I started to spend my personal time to "have a fun" after few months in that company. And now? I'm not working in that company and I'm still a member (I'm very proud on Czech translation - we built up nice team; I started a Pootle with Daniel, Julio and others; I read through forums and blogs time to time). As you can see, I'm not a holly contributor and bug-killer. But I sill feel like a member.

This is what we need. We need to show to new users how great Liferay is. We need to show to the world that "Liferay is a software with a heart."

Agreed! Liferay is great!

I also came on as a Type A and quickly realized how amazing Liferay is and wanted to contribute.

I participate in the community for many of the reasons discussed throughout this thread. Ultimately though it's about giving back to Liferay and the community and collaborating with other members. The way I see it, the help I get from the community is incentive enough.

I do think though that it would be nice to devise some other system for recognizing the active community members. The current method of ranking in the forums is certainly skewed. Right now it's about when you join the community and quantity of posts rather than value.

We can produce a Liferay community survey and give access to everyone to fill in, anonymously or not. At least this will be an independent (from Liferay Inc) assessment of community feelings and expectations.
If you know any questions (and possible answers), post them in this thread, and we'll quickly include them into a public survey. Up-to-date results Excel spreadsheet will always be made available for downloading to everyone interested.

Wow, this thread gets better every day, thanks for the excellent and thoughtful posts. One thing to keep in mind with "unanwered forum posts" is that that in many cases, people neglect to come back and mark "this is a good answer" flag to indicate the question has been answered -- they read the answer and then move on.

I agree with the assessment of the types of people and the progression from "Have to use Liferay" to "Want to use Liferay" and "Want to Contribute". I also loved this quote from Tomas:



I don't think we'll ever make group B approach the size of group A. Nor do I want that to happen, because it would mean that there are no more "newbies" who are just starting with Liferay and have a simple question or two

As community manager, I wholeheartedly support generating statistics. There is a ton to mine from our database and the built-in features only scratch the surface. Since the forum is probably the most active tool used by the community, it is a good place to look for stats, but it is not the only one. I am going to start a series of blog posts about interesting stats. Perhaps a "Social Analytics" plugin for the Liferay Marketplace is also in order My guess is that would be very useful, and popular.

I am also very supportive of a community survey, especially when the questions are generated by our community leaders like those in this thread. I will offer to use Liferay's surveymonkey account (we have an unlimited account) - of course the survey can be anonymous.

As far as questions for a survey, here are a couple:

Motivation:
- Why do you use Liferay?
- How long have you used it?
- What is your relationship to Liferay? (community member, customer, partner, employee, etc)
- Have you attended an event where Liferay was the main focus?

Community:
- Do you feel adequately informed of Community activity?
- Where do you get most of your community information (forums, blogs, twitter, etc)
- What do you like most about the community?
- What do you like least about the community?
- What would you most like to see improved?

My colleague @ Alfresco recently did something like this. You can see the results here (and we can probably get some idea of more questions as well).

Lets go survey!

But, hey, please stop. What's the goal? To know how to motivate community members? Is this really the most helpful think we could do? I don't think so.

I personally feel that there are pretty heavier problems in the air. We should concentrate on those and motivation comes by the way. If I understand the Alfresco survey well, the key goal was to know where are the holes in our boat, captains First fix the holes, then paint the boat Do we really know our problems? Problems of newbies, users (these who use it) and contributors? Every group has specific ones and all are important. Maybe that community is really bunch of newbies and the rest - to be clear - it's not us and them - everyone is a part of the community and they should know about it (community without newbies is just a boat full of old rats ) But our task (regardless of our size) is to help them and their task is to listen. Everyone who wants to listen is welcome.

Well, I think the goal of this survey should uncover problems of the domain groups - newbies (group A), and group B - users and old rats . Maybe some survey could go also to Liferay employees, what do they think? ;)

My friend has one gold rule - don't come with problem, come with a solution (doesn't mind if bad / primitive solution). So first part should be something like - "How can we help you?" and the second part "Tell us simplest solution how would you solve it?" - keep in mind that everyone has responsibilities (together with influence) in the community - even survey takers (and I want smart community members who think, not those who only choose from A,B,C).

Survey can be segmented by vertical view (groups (newbies, users + rats) specific view) and horizontal view (problem domains questions). We first need to aim the user - from which continent, developer/manager, how long live with Liferay, already community member? - to correctly setup the vertical view. The horizontal could have categories:
I, what are we not aware of
1, your problems - how can we help you
2, tell us the simplest solution you see
II, what are we aware of (in case the category I, won't bring any results ):
3, knowledge (how they get to solutions, is documentation complete/useful, is forum well organized, etc., are forum answers helpful, response in-time?, what about wiki, blogs, do you want to go deeper inside the portal?),
4, contributions (how many , how would they imagine to contribute, what are we missing),
5, social aspects (community mood, expectations, do you want to be part of community+why (not), symposiums/local events, what do you (dis)like),
6, another (quality, security, ...?) ... please help ...

Together with stats we should have good knowledge which group want's what, some ideas how to solve it and how is the survey complete - how many peoples we have in each category and how are the problems hot (we still need to somehow deliver the survey to more than 30 users ;) ).

And after this we can start to work on it. 100 PCs, Leadership team, Bug Squad and Community Verifiers teams are gaining big success (thanks to big James' effort!). Why not to continue and create workgroup(s) to solve discovered problems (e.g. documentation sqad )? I know it takes James' time to organize it but it has visible and useful results.

This could be a way how to rise motivation. We can give them better knowledge of Liferay, learn new technologies, help them to scratch their own itches (they still have to to listen what to do) and they give something back to community - help us (and themselves), will be part of something bigger and they will gain respect - which are the motivators we have and expressed.

I hope it makes sense - I've never conducted any survey so I can be totally out

-- tom

Ok, let's do it (survey), sounds like we have plenty of questions to ask and analyze.
By the end of next week we'll put an initial survey based on the above questions and mentioned Alfresco poll.

I expect it to be fairly large and people may not be able to answer it in a single go, so based on our experience of doing similar setup, I would suggest to have 2 types of survey initiation:
1) Half-anonymous: Participant requests login by supplying email address with subsequent log ins & log outs. Password is generated and emailed. On every login the user will be automatically directed to a last visited section of survey
2) Fully-anonymous: Participant starts survey, types answers, then if can not complete entire survey in one go - clicks 'Suspend Survey'. Encrypted file is generated and it shall be saved on participant's desktop/memory stick. To 'Resume' survey, this file shall be uploaded back to survey portlet.

It is also very likely that we will have sections and subsections (and may be sub-subsections), I would suggest that we would allow participants to jump from section to section freely.

Anyway, I'll post a link when it is ready for commenting on survey design. James, you may want to open a separate thread to discuss structure of survey. This thread is too important to be polluted by technicalities.

PS. We'll also put a real-time dashboard for each question that could be charted, even for incomplete surveys.

Hey Victor, what software and/or site will you use for the survey? It sounds like you have one in mind I've also volunteered to use SurveyMonkey.

In any case, be aware that really long surveys tend to be ignored too So if it takes an hour to complete, that might be a problem. But let's see what kind of question we can come up with. If you already have an idea of where to host the survey, then we can wait until you get an initial skeleton up and then discuss in a separate thread (feel free to open one once you have something we can all look at and discuss).

I was suggesting to use liferay-based survey portlet on one of own sites. Over the last 2 years it was used many times for corporate surveys on Liferay5.2.3 and 6.1. There is not much fun to use someone-else's online capability for needs of a world-leading portal ().

I think even the fact of using native Liferay survey portlet may also attract more participants. Seeing real-time OOTB and custom applications ticking on Liferay6.1 CE could be another part of community motivation.

I have not used surveymonkey, so it would be hard for me to understand effort involved in setting Liferay community survey on it. May be someone else has surveymonkey expertise?

Oh, I knew you were going to volunteer your services here And I wholeheartedly accept We (Liferay) have a surveymonkey account where you can create surveys and embed them elsewhere, I was just offering to use that (I've used it a couple of times before), but using CE for a Community survey sounds more inviting and fun :-)

A brief note: I have asked our Team Leader, Rhys, to commence mapping the survey structure, based on your and Tomas input and Alfresco sample.
Survey should be coming up for discussions soon (subject to other workload...), hopefully by the end of next week.
Rhys will join Liferay forum and will continue this conversation when ready.

I guess I started from group B first using it for my own purposes. Once I fell in love with it I started promoting it at work and after several years I now belong to group C. Liferay wasn't first portal I used but rather became the #1 choice after evaluating all the portals that I could get my hands on. I still keep tabs on the competition and I'm still very pleased with my investment in Liferay and where it's heading.

Yeah, I just came here to bump this thread and find out if Victor & Co. have had a chance to work on the survey!

I started 2 weeks ago with summing up a list of questions.
Until today i did not have time finish.
Hope to find some time this week if there is still need for some input.

Otherwise I focus on translations which are also way due.

Yes, we have. I'll put out the suggestions this week. As usual, takes longer than expected as new projects kick in...

Friendly ping Any chance you could put out your suggestions in the next 11 days? We have our quarterly community leadership team meeting coming up on October 25 and it'd be nice to talk about this and move it to the next step during that call.

Thanks for all information sofar
As a start I promised some list of questions aggregated from FOSS studies.
I did not make verticals/horizontals as Tomasz suggests or spend any thought on how we should conduct a survey since i have no knowledge on this.

General:
What is your;
- Nationality
- Location
- Sex- Age
- Education
- Profession

Liferay :
How long do you know about Liferay ?
<1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

How did you get to know Liferay ?
Educational institute, Employer, Customer, Myself, Other

How long do you use Liferay ?
<1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 years

How did you get to use Liferay ?
I decided myself to use Liferay, Someone else decided to use Liferay, Me and others decided to use Liferay

What ratio of your professional time are you busy on/with Liferay ?
10-90,20-80,30-40,.....

Which Liferay information sources do you use most ?
Books, LR Forum, LR Wiki, LR Blogs, LR Live, Other Forum, Other Blogs, ...

How many Liferay projects did you worked on?
0,1,2,3,4,....

What versions Of Liferay did you use;
1.7.5, ..., 6

What is your Liferay Projects CE / EE ratio
10-90,20-80,30-40,.....

Are you working for a Liferay Partner?
Yes,No

Do you expect Liferay to stay Open source?
Yes,No

Do you expect Liferay to be bought by Oracle?
Yes,No

Contribution :
Do you contribute to the Liferay Community ?
Yes, No

How much time do you spend monthly contributing to other Open Source projects ?
0,1,2,3,4,....

How much time do you spend monthly to community participation ? (School,Sports,Municipality,etc)
0,1,2,3,4,..
..

No I do not contribute
Why don't you contribute to Liferay ?
Not enough knowledge, No time, No interest, No expected benefit, Liferay is no true Open Source project, Liferay inc should do it.

When would you contribute?
Never, When i have more knowledge on Liferay, When i get Liferay recognition, When i get Liferay goodies, When i get Liferay training. When i get special Liferay priviledges.

Yes I do contribute
How long do you contribute to the Liferay Community ?
1,2,3,4,5,6,7 years

How do you contribute to the Liferay Community ?\
No, Forum, Blogs, Bug Squad, Documentation, Wiki, Translation, Fixing bugs, Community Plugins, Sponsored development

How much time do you spend monthly contributing to Liferay ?
0,1,2,3,4,....

What is your motivation to contribute to the Liferay Community .
Giving something back,
Learn participating in a group,
Build relationships,
Recognition,
Intellectual challenge,
learn and develop new skills,
share knowledge and skills,
think that software should not be a proprietary good,
get help in realizing a good idea for a software product,
improve Liferay of other developers,
improve my job opportunities,
make money

How do you value your Liferay Community contribution.
I give more than, less thank the same as I take

How do you value others Liferay Community contribution.
They give more than, less than, the same as I take

Do you think contributing to the Liferay Project improves your chances on the labourmarket
Yes, No

Does your company reward OS contribution by employees.
No,more salary, better position, provides worktime, provides tools, provides courses, other