Learning to fly

eBox community, according to Pareto and Anderson

4 October, 2009

A few weeks ago I was playing with statistical data from eBox forum, trying to find some behavior pattern and to understand a bit better its dynamics. I tried in particular a couple of well-know principles applied to businesses:

• The Pareto principle, stating that 20% of your customers are behind 80% of your revenues
• The Long Tail distribution, described by Chris Anderson, stating that in an Internet-based business, sales tend toward a long tail graph

Well, as I wanted to see how well these two principles were applied to our community, I just had to change customers with forum members and sales with posts in the forum. The results were really surprising. I was expecting some correlation with the previous principles, but I found out that the behavior was exactly as predicted by the business principles. Here you can see the graph of our long-tailed community (data are freely available at our forum statistics).

So far, it was qualitatively well understood that in every open source community there is a core of very active members and a bulk of sporadic contributors. However, these results can give some quantitative and visual insights on this behavior. I believe they can be applied to other communities and I would love to hear of other examples where these principles work.

Entry Filed under: Community. .