One of my favorite new discourse 1.9 features is the “time spent (time spent recently)” stat on user cards. This is super helpful for understanding whether the person I am looking at is a truly active, participating member of the community who is curious and engaged.
I’d be interested in getting this information about discourse groups. Specifically, how much time have members of a particular discourse group spent collectively reading discussions? It will help to monitor the health of different parts of the community, and also to generate some competitive energy between groups to get them reading.
As far as I know this data does not exist anywhere, though it likely can be arrived at by downloading user lists into excel or via the query explorer. Before I devote any time to it, please let me know if it does exist somewhere or if someone has already or would be willing to write a data explorer query. It would simply spit out a list of groups along with two numbers: collective time spent reading overall and time spent reading in the last 60 days. Maybe a column with the number of members in the group would also be interesting to look at in connection with the time spent numbers.
One possible use case: we’ve been talking about ways to encourage logging in and reading discussions by staff in my organization. We’re over 100 people spread around the globe, and the level of participation is mixed. Some log in every day and participate regularly by posting and liking and replying, some log in and read as lurkers without posting and liking much, and many (vast majority really) rely on email notifications and reply by email or don’t reply at all. All of them are in various discourse group by staff and by team. So would be neat to let them know once in a while how much time they are spending as a team on discourse as compared to other teams.
(On the path towards “full citizenship” for groups, it would be amazing to eventually display group stats including collective read time on group pages. Group “user card” may be overkill but potentially also a nice thing for some communities.)