Any building block you are using to deliver your API to developers, such as blog or forum should have metrics attached to it. You should be collecting any data you can on activity in your API community and reporting on it.
I received a platform update from Facebook developer community, with the following stats:
Bugzilla activity for the past seven days:
- 117 new bugs were reported
- 3 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
- 19 bugs were fixed (18 previously reported bugs and 1 new bug)
- As of today, there are 4,032 open bugs in Bugzilla
Developer Forum activity for the past seven days:
- 557 new topics were created
- 377 new topics received at least one reply in the past week
- Of those, 152 were replied to by an admin
- Of those, 187 were replied to by a moderator
These are great examples of how to report on metrics that give good insights into the Facebook developer community.
Setting metrics, gathering data, and making sense of this data will make you more knowledgeable about your API community participants, and sharing these findings with your community will increase transparency and bring your community closer together.
