Last weekend I arrived in Germany to attend the Matomo Community Meetup 2015 and now I am in Poland.
The meetup was HOT in every sense! Berlin temperatures reached 35 degrees (celsius), as I finally meet in person several long-time, dedicated Matomo community contributors.
Meetup preparation in Berlin, photo by M. Zawadziński, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Pictures from the meetup preparation sessions
In the first leg of my trip I was in Berlin to meet Matomo community members to prepare for the 2015 annual Matomo community meetup. These are my notes taken during the meeting at the request of one of my colleagues. I also relayed live on Framasphère, Twitter and IRC.
Community discussion at the meetup, photo by D.Czajka, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
More pictures from the Matomo meetup
This was harder than I expected, as I took notes with my laptop, pictures with my phone, wrote live to social media (using the Android Diaspora Native Web App), and used my laptop to relay on IRC. Going forward this requires better preparation, I was glad I had a few links and pictures ready before hand but it really requires intense focus to achieve this. I am glad presenters were patient when I requested repeating some of the ideas they shared. I am also a bit disappointed not much happened in IRC.
Two day preparation sessions
The discussions and session we had during the two days prior to the meetup are available here.
We gathered in rented apartments in Berlin, this reminded me very much of similar community gatherings and perhaps of BarCamp and, at a much smaller scale, UDS sessions.
Matomo Pizza!, photo by F. Rodríguez, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
A list of ideas of topics was initially submitted, we then proceeded to have scheduled sessions for open discussion. Several people shared their concern there was no possible remote participation which led to making public the Trello boards used/linked here.
Note: The Trello links below still have action items and notes that are pending bug report / feature requests filing which should happen over the coming weeks. Most importantly, many action items will need identifying leads for different community team including Translations and Documentation, and better coordination of coming community engagement.
Monday sessions consisted of the following subjects:
- What are Matomo values & how to communicate them? (see below for details)
- How to encourage and recognize new external contributors?
- How could we double the Matomo userbase?
- How Community can organise help resources
On Tuesday we met again to discuss the following subjects:
- Matomo Long Term support (LTS)
- How do Matomo.org (project) and Piwik PRO (company) sit together / are organized? – An important part of this session was about having better communication channels and improving the new team page (bug #8520 and bug #8519, respectively)
- Improving usability of Matomo e.g. for new users – this last session was not held has we ran out of time and prepared to go to the meetup venue.
Some more details about individual preparation sessions
What are Matomo values & how to communicate them?
The main subjects in this session were important changes proposed in the project mission and values. This was edited directly on on the wiki page on GitHub, some of the changes can be seen by comparing revisions.
Matomo mission statement (bug #7376)
“To create the leading Free and open source analytics platform, and to support global organisations and communities to keep full control over their data.”
Our values
- Openness
- Freedom
- Transparency
- Data ownership
- Privacy
- Kaizen (改善): continuous improvement
This was also presented by Matthieu Aubry at the meetup and is published in the Roadmap page. Bringing more visibility and perhaps having a top page for Mission and Values was also brought up.
Meetup agenda and notes
The official agenda is available here.
Many Piwik PRO employees stayed in Berlin for the meetup, and we had good participation although less than last year in Munich as my colleagues told me. Some were consultants, others staff from public organizations, universities, etc. In retrospect considering the very hot weather and summer holidays the attendance was good. I was very happy to arrive at the beautiful Kulturbrauerei and enter the air-conditioned Soda Club. T-Shirts were waiting for all attendees and free drinks (non-alcohol!) were welcome :)
Matomo meetup, photo by F. Rodríguez, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Maciej Zawadziński (Piwik PRO CEO) started with a nice retrospective on the Matomo project:
- Last 12 months with Matomo: a global overview by Maciej Zawadziński (PDF w/incorporated ODF source)
Then Matthieu Aubry (Matomo core developer) shared his presentation on current and upcoming Matomo activities:
- The state of Matomo in 2015 and the road to 3.0.0 by Matt Aubry (PDF w/incorporated ODF source)
Features and directions for the future of Matomo
This was followed by a community discussion about “Features and directions for the future of Matomo”. The feedback and ideas shared included:
- Any plans for implementing heatmaps/scrollmaps?
- Improvements to the Matomo UI
- Improvements to custom alerts
- How to improve discovery of plugin help/docs
- Media measurement: measure performance of campaigns in Matomo
- Cost information support, one idea is to integrate w/ Doublelink, AdWord, etc. & pull cost info in Matomo reports and determine positive or neg ROI
- LTS (long term support in Matomo) what would you expect? A 2Y timeframe would be ideal, having always LTS versions, and no need to update constantly. eg. CMS that has an LTS 2y policy, admins are very happy about maintenance cycles: no need to worry about extensions used, or having lots of time to plan & arrange for installations. When updating Matomo, another concern is corrupting a DB/other functionality.
Matomo Analytics (formerly Piwik Analytics) Integrations: a not-so-useless presentation
Ronan Chardoneau presenting at the Matomo meetup, photo by D. Czajka, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Next Ronan Chardonneau presented about Matomo Analytics (formerly Piwik Analytics) Integrations. This was a very intriguing and inspiring presentation on something I’d like to think as “Tracking everywhere”. Ronan described different possible additional real-world metrics that could be tracked by Matomo and shared his experience trying to use hardware to link such events to actions tracking with Matomo.
Community discussion: Your Matomo cases, inspirations, ideas
More community discussion followed, the theme was “Your Matomo cases, inspirations, ideas”. The following subjects caught my attention:
- Discoverability of great functionality such as search terms, track anything thanks to HTTP API
- Insights? It’s too hidden, perhaps make it more visible, publish a how-to
- Use cases of measurement, maybe document this as a white paper
- Have reference points to guide/educate users on metrics: eg. “bounce rate for this type of site should be around XYZ”, “Ecommerce action # vs no. of visits is not coherent with similar sites”
- Data could be sent to Matomo anonymized, (and be public for others) to analyze/determine reference points
- Integrate simple tips in Matomo: eg. bounce rate is too high/low, propose corrective actions
- Cross-website analytics
- Can Matomo track people? Visit/Visitor/Pageview are used in web context
- Translating the website measurement metaphor in others could help find new “internet of things” to measure:
- Measuring activities in manufacturing ie. Intelligent factory
- Store traffic/entry/decision not to go in after stopping+looking at sign
- JIT management in factories -> tracking stock, materials, etc.
- Liberating banking data: banks can determine/change their conditions under which they make available their data (ex: financial data only kept X months)
- Gathering health data information, keep it forever, own it – eg. FitBit
Maciej Zawadziński presenting at the Matomo meetup, photo by D. Czajka, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
The meetup was wrapped up with a presentation on Enterprise Analytics:
- Open-source analytics in the Enterprise-level environment. Opportunities and challenges by Maciej Zawadziński
By 9 PM we moved to the beautiful nearby Kulturbrauerei restaurant outside, where beer, german sausage and hamburgers where very welcome. The weather remained very harsh, with some rain later on, but this didn’t prevent most of the group and staff to join and continue the discussions started during the meetup.
If you wish to continue such discussions online, I have also posted on the Forums about this.
