[Commons-l] Institutional stats reports

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi all,

Last week I went to a conference hosted by Creative Commons Australia
<http://creativecommons.org.au/australasiancommons>. One of the talks
was "Play at Powerhouse" by Sebastian Chan, the manager of web
services at Powerhouse Museum. They are one of the institutions
participating in Flickr's "The Commons" -
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/>.

A lot of their images have been transferred to Commons. I sat up in my
chair fairly well when Seb raised this as an "issue". From his
perspective, this is a problem, because once the images leave Flickr,
they lose the ability to easily track and report usage. As an
institution they use these stats to justify the effort of making their
content digitally available (and geocoding it, and maintaining the
Flickr community, etc).

There are some screenshots showing Flickr stats in this post:
<http://searchengineland.com/071213-161815.php>

Making institutions feel more comfortable with their content appearing
on Wikimedia Commons is obviously a good thing for us. We have
pageview stats and checkusage and who knows what other exciting stuff.

I think we should develop an automated process for creating
institutional stats reports and then contact the institutions whose
works we use and offer them this report - starting with the Powerhouse
Museum.

In fact, I don't see a reason not to make the reports public. They
could be generated once a month (or day, whatever) and then sit on the
toolserver for people to look at. Providing them as a public reference
might actually serve as incentive for more institutions to actively
engage with us.

Thoughts? Good idea or waste of time?

cheers,
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/