Social Actions – Metrics
Social Actions is a great project, bringing together donation and volunteer opportunity data from all around the web into a single API. It has really expanded the reach and accessability of these opportunities. We had such a great time creating the Social Actions Tuner and Social Actions continues to be more than deserving of effort by the nonprofit technology community. Why not make a new project?
http://sadata.preludeinteractive.com/
This site uses the Google Maps API, the Social Actions Database, Kohana PHP framework, and true grit. Our aim is to create a way for the data sources of Social Actions to view the quality and robustness of their data, and hopefully catch little problems before they become big problems.
We finally got some time to figure out the Google Charts axis labels and scaling – this project tracks 4 standard metrics per action source (including all the sources, which is the default. You can use it to get a sense of relative performance within a particular action source (are they not updating as frequently, are there a lot of “old” actions in the system). You can also compare sources but I would guard against that – the actions coming from each can be quite different. As always, please compare what you see with reality before recommending anything to an action source. 
I’d like to start tracking a second set of metrics, using only the actions which were created in, say, the last month, which may give more accurate numbers for some metrics. Other than that – any ideas? Is there anything you think we should start tracking?
By the way, the source code for this project is available as a read-only SVN repository. If you want to contribute, let me know and I’ll give you write access. http://svn.preludeinteractive.com/socialactions/analysis/
