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# System prepended metadata

title: Statistics vs Metrics in board reports

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# What do we want in a report

## Background

Each month we get reports from projects that list meaningless statistics such as "Traffic on dev@ list increased by 2%" and I am left wondering why anyone could possibly care about this. This inevitably leads to the question, what do we actually care about in board reports?

Any information that we already know, or can obtain programmatically, we should do so, and the board report to be actual useful feedback from the PMC. The board report is for introspection about the state of the project, for promotion of the quarter's "wins", an idea of their roadmap for the future, the risks/challenges that they face in achieving those goals, and for feedback from the project as to what the Foundation could be doing to help them meet their goals.

Not for a list of mostly meaningless statistics.

Having the PMC think of their report as a public blog post, rather than as a series of checkboxes, would result in much more valuable reports - valuable to the board, to the project, and to the public that we claim to serve.

## Proposal

We could have a limited pilot program that we try for a few months where we ask a few projects - ones that we know are already writing good reports - to instead write a report that answers the following questions:

* What are your wins this quarter? (This is presumably in addition to releases and PMC/Committer additions, since we theoretically already know that.)
* What are your plans for the coming 2 quarters?
* What challenges are risks are you facing as a project, and how are those impacting your goals as a project?
* Assuming infinite budget and staffing, what could the Foundation be doing differently/more/less that would help you meet your goals?

All other information (Committer/PMC changes, releases, mailing list stats, etc) are already trivially available to us.
