We've spent the past month launching the SCMS and SociallyConstructed.Online.

​It's been a lot of work, but that work has paid off, and we're excited to unveil some of the fruits of our behind-the-scenes work, much of which has been dedicated to promoting our upcoming partnership with the CHAOSS project.  

This blog is promoting the 1st of many collaborative efforts between SociallyConstructed.Online and CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics Open Source Software). We are incredibly thankful for the opportunity to sit down and record a full hour-long podcast discussing the Social Currency Metrics System on CHAOSS  Community's podcast, CHAOSScast.

​If you're interested in how SociallyConstructed.Online emerged, why we do what we do, and what we have in store in the future, give it a listen here and consider subscribing to the podcast! Venia is officially a regular on the show and we plan to have a long-standing relationship with CHAOSS moving forward.

A More Formal conversation with CHAOSS
Prior to this podcast we had a more internal presentation with the CHAOSS community after last year's Open Source Summit in San Diego.  This provides a more structured, and more visual approach the Social Currency Metrics System, and CHAOSS.
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In this blog series, at opensource.com, and on her own page, Ria is going to update us on her project every week! 

Before we launch in to her first blog though...Ria, It is absolutely wonderful to have you! 

This blog has been cross-posted from Ria's blog with her permission...

It had been my first encounter with the open-source world.

​Despite very encouraging mentors, it was very intimidating at first. I can still remember the numbness I felt after submitting my first PR. There were times when I self-doubted myself, but as it is said, the mornings bring a ray of hope along, I got back to my feet to work.

​I had applied for both GSoC and Outreachy under the organisation CHAOSS, and on May 04, I was euphoric after getting selected in both! I decided to continue with GSoC during the summer of 2020.

The account of me getting selected for GSOC’20 came as a piece of pleasant news to me. I got selected for GSOC under the organisation CHAOSS, for the project “Implementing Social Currency Metric System in Grimoirelabs”.

​I will be working for the next 3 months, starting from June- Aug’20 remotely on this project for the software improvement position. My project has 4 mentors from different geographical locations.

​I am glad to be a part of such a welcoming and encouraging community.

Want to see Ria's progress with the project in more real-time? check out her project tracker here!

Community sentiment is based on the opinions and expectations of community members which is very important for framing decisions. Member input in essential decisions to public health is very important and thus, helps in better decisions which in turn help in the better framework and execution. Collecting and processing all the data like emails, comments, issues, pull requests, tweets etc. will allow community leaders to make key quality decisions regarding transparency and actionability of open source project health. Data is tagged with respect to social currency constructs like Merit, Trust, Transparency, Utility, Consistency.

By Implementing the Social Currency Metric System, we will be able to measure the value of community interactions to accurately gauge the ‘reputation’ of a community. Implementing Social Currency Metric System (SCMS) will be a huge milestone in providing a better view of project health in the open-source community. That is because, through SCMS, we are adding another dimension of social currency in the metric. Measuring community interactions, analysing it will definitely take CHAOSS one step ahead to measure project health.

• Extract enriched_index data from GrimoireLab ELK backends for different data points like GitHub, Twitter, emails etc and storing all attributes in a CSV
• Importing all data obtained into excel or google sheets and AirTable using APIs.
• Tag data in Airtable, Now import the tagged dataset and convert to JSON format.
• Export the tagged data back to enriched_index.
• Make analytical visualisations with the enriched data in the GrimoireLab Siglis dashboard (default dashboard for enriched indexes) to see the trends and make other interpretations from the tagged data.
• Integrate the methods with GrimoireLabs backends. This will be done by adding the scripts (used for extracting enriched data, processing it, converting into JSON etc) in GrimoireLab backends.
• Ensure the robustness of the system by making unit test codes.

Stretch Goals

• Automate the process of tagging datasets by using prior trained models.
• Using a consensus (marking the majority) method to tag a data point.
• Look for any other more accurate and less tedious method to tag datasets
• Measuring community sentiment by implementing sentiment analysis on the extracted enriched index data.

I thank my family, friends and super helping mentors for supporting me and encouraging to work harder. ❤

I plan to dedicate myself completely to complete the project efficiently. I hope I do due justice to the project and the community :)
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Looking forward to loads of fun and a fantastic learning experience!

Follow the rest of her journey!

This past January, our friends over at CHAOSS announced the newest round of community metrics to go into their community analytics system, GrimoireLab, and nestled in those new metric updates was a type of metric that has not yet been featured before in CHAOSS... Our Social Currency Metrics System (SCMS)!

Then on May 4th, we were told that we had been accepted alongside side software developer Ria Gupta for the Google Summer of Code, to write the SCMS directly into GrimoireLab as a metric! 

In this blog we'll explain why we’ve been added to GrimoireLab, why we think it matters for you, and most importantly what the next steps are in this exciting new process, so you can implement the system, for free, starting today!

As part of an open-source industry built upon contributions from hundreds of online community members, users of CHAOSS' metrics platform need to understand their impacts on a "culture."

Software companies invest in community managers and developers who, in turn, need tools to understand how well their communities are growing and how people are seeing their influence in those communities. ​
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GrimoireLab and other projects at CHAOSS have done a great job of informing you of your community’s health by building metrics that reliably point toward success.
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​But quantitative data is only a "behavior-tracking" strategy. Relying only on it to determine community health is like tracing a person’s footsteps in the sand to see where they went, but never asking them where they're going, or whether they want you to follow them.

The numbers, trends, and other metrics CHAOSS offers provide a way to infer the community's status and where a community is going, but they are guessing at feelings, opinions, and voices that are clearly better found in qualitative data.

The obvious and typical answer is to implement periodic surveys and pulse checks, but as we've stated in our blog on the 3 pitfalls of surveys, qualitative data is hard. Collecting it is a big part of the battle.

It's not enough that it's difficult and time consuming to collect.  Once you have it, it's hard to know what's important, whose voices are silenced, and where the bias is. And then there’s sifting through it, finding reliable objective results in it, and knowing what to do with the findings.

The SCMS approaches this problem directly.  

In our view here at SC.O, virtual communities are inherently socio-cultural.  If communities are social in nature, they should be measured and studied social-scientifically.

So we built the SCMS to simplify the same processes anthropologists use to study cultures, and created an interface that makes it easier and faster for business leaders to get qualitative results out of passive-user-sentiment. 

At the heart of a community’s value, it’s not about what people have done, but how community members express themselves in the process of doing.

People participate in communities for intrinsic reasons and those reasons are typically stated in their wants, opinions, and feelings as valuable, capturable data.

Unfortunately it’s also "said in the moment" as it’s happening.  It’s fleeting. You won’t see it in a once-quarterly survey or focus group no matter how many gift cards you set up.  ​In other words, there’s value in measuring how people think and how they communicate in the moment.

There have been some amazing and wonderous developments before we've even been able to launch SociallyConstructed.Online's brand.  But now, with so much momentum, we've got a lot coming down the pipeline: 

1st, remember that Software developer, Ria Gupta, you heard about?
She just started her own full series releasing every sunday detailing how she's building the SCMS in Grimoire lab on here, her personal blog, and on the CHAOSS Blog!

2nd, listen to the new CHAOSScast podcast!
The CHAOSScast podcast just launched with Georg Link, Matt Broberg, and other magnificent panelists so give it a listen and the SCMS is the second episode premiering Friday May 29th!

Venia will also be a regular panelist on the podcast so join us to talk about all things community analytics! 

3rd,  start up the SCMS for FREE using the new instructions over at CHAOSS!
We are providing this system as a methodology for free because we truly believe that augmenting your data with qualtiative social listening will make a better, safer, more secure online community. ​

And of course if you'd like to learn more, get a personalized demo, or have us set up your SCMS, we offer a free 1-hour consultation as well! ​

How can online marketing, an industry that’s infamous for its metrics-obsessed capacity to be downright predatory, become as much a benefit to consumer communities as it is for the business? 

SociallyConstructed.Online was founded to answer this question.

By focusing on bettering brands through participation and collaboration with the communities supporting them, Samantha “Venia” Logan sought to lessen the marketing industry’s reliance on  morally gray, overzealous behavioral tracking systems.

After offhandedly mentioning this idea to yours truly (Dylan), we took a rough idea and built it from pipe dream to a business focused on improving the industry’s relationship with online communities using our own data analytics system — the Social Currency Metric System.

SociallyConstructed.Online’s purpose today is simple: 

We equip those in charge of online communities with tools that ethically “listen” to what those contributing to conversations online are saying. 

The end goal is to take these insights, and help community managers, data analysts, influencers and business owners collaborate with the communities supporting them. We provide real-time qualitative data to help orient themselves in a direction that will promote business growth and consumer goodwill. 

This collaborative effort relies primarily upon passive social listening of data channels such as Facebook feeds or support ticket queues. By relying on qualitative data from conversations surrounding your brand instead of intrusive quantitative tracking, we’ve taken lessons from academia. The social sciences' use of data analysis methods to study cultures and other such groups has given us a decades’ old tried-and-true toolbox to work with.

Tools that we have made user-friendly enough for daily business and analytics use.

​While quantitative data can infer how people generally feel, qualitative data gives those feelings context enough to make powerful and insightful observations. It helps to shine light on trends that quantitative data isn’t able to pick up on, and proper collection of qualitative data can reduce or eliminate the cons to qualitative data analysis we covered earlier.

As Venia discussed in our blog on the pitfalls of surveys in qualitative data, surveys are prone to failure because they collect “active” data — data that is explicitly requested — rather than “passive data,” or data that is generated as a result of regular participation.

Qualitative data analysis of comments and suggestions left on channels such as Facebook  don’t rely on those souls kind enough to take your survey — it’s feedback straight from those who are freely sharing their thoughts and feelings with you. 

The more your customers feel like they’re being heard, the more they’ll be willing to share their thoughts and opinions with you in hopes that their pain points will be addressed. The question, then, is how to begin this loop of passive consumer feedback you can act on to improve your business and garner yet more feedback.

SC.O’s answer to that question lies in social capital and our Social Currency Metrics System. 

The Social Currency Metrics System, or the SCMS, for short, is how SociallyConstructed.Online helps businesses involve their consumers directly in their reputation management and decision making processes. 

Reputation is a paramount concern of community managers and businesses alike, as it plays an increasingly tangible role in the success of a business, and the likeliness of patrons willing to support them. Many people no longer just purchase products, but rather seek to support their friends and family as well as those whose values and goals match up with their own.

A key component of that “relatable small-business” mentality is the ability to understand the wants and needs of your consumer base in real time, so you can pivot to meet your clientele’s needs as they arise. 

SC.O does that by an evaluation of five specific “traits” used in garnering reputation:

Businesses begin by identifying what each of these metrics mean to them, and then they can begin to sort through the qualitative data they collect in order to see where their consumers think they shine, and where they could use some work.

The system is an extraordinarily simple one that can lead to surprisingly in-depth qualitative data analysis. It is capable of offering up an obscene amount of information at the cost of only 1-2 hours a week, once the system is set up and ready to go. 

Week-to-week “snapshots” of how businesses are doing in the eyes of their consumers can help businesses brainstorm plans of attack. By utilizing the SCMS to form actionable next steps in accordance with the wishes of their clientele, businesses can achieve tangible and measurable gains in customer sentiment, practically in real time.

Quantitative data has reigned supreme since data-harvesting tools and the sort of demographic information made available by companies like Facebook made the information so easy to come by.

Completely rewriting the playbook is a big ask. 

That’s why we aren’t asking you to change the way you market to your audiences. We’re only suggesting that you supplement it with the tactics and strategies we have to offer.

SociallyConstructed.Online’s biggest strength is not just in our role as the inventors of the SCMS analytics platform.  We're also experienced small-business consultants with almost 20 collective years of experience in the digital marketing industry. 

We are skilled and practiced in areas such as rebranding, development or optimization of marketing funnels, content creation, SEO, and more.

None of these are any less important than sentiment analysis when it comes to digital marketing. So while the integration of the SCMS into existing data analytics strategies is our primary service, SC.O takes a full-stack approach to our digital marketing services so you can pick and elevate the strategies that will reap the most benefit.

Sales pitch over. 

The point I’m trying to make is that Venia and I built SociallyConstructed.Online because we as marketers need to do better.

We came to this conclusion because of growing disillusionment with the status quo of digital marketing. The wild, wild west days of digital marketing are over. Laws like the GDPR are having a profound effect on the sorts of information companies are allowed access to and how they’re stored.

Choosing not to participate with these regulations is no longer an option. SC.O’s SCMS system makes adhering to these guidelines easily achievable, by rendering the morally gray behavior tracking implementations that collect information on consumers they don’t want you to have, unnecessary.

Part 2 of this series will cover social currency as it pertains to qualitative marketing, and how it has become the backbone of our SCMS system. Sign up for our newsletter to keep in touch with our new releases, and make sure to stay tuned, for more exciting content is coming down the pipe soon!