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Show HN: Data driven decisions in OSS [helm-dashboard] (docs.google.com)
4 points by itielshwartz on Feb 16, 2023 | hide | past | favorite
Helm dashboard (https://github.com/komodorio/helm-dashboard) is my first big open-source project, and during the last couple of months, we at Komodor have consistently been working on improving it (We released a GA and got 3K stars in a couple of months), but we were scratching our heads with the future roadmap!

The tricky part of OSS is that it's hard to know what should be developed next; we tried a couple of methods to make this work: 1. Reach directly to the users - but there's no easy way of doing so (we don't store any identifiers of who is using the project) 2. Github issues - not many people are actively opening GitHub issues, so you are left mainly with people reporting severe bugs or issues. 3. Reading about the problem in different places: Hacker news, Reddit, etc. - hard to get concrete insights.

To cope with those problems, we decided to create our first-ever user survey and ask the users and community members what they wanted (added CTA inside the product and GitHub to engage with the users).

Luckily for us, after two weeks, we got 22 answers! It might not sound like a lot, but it gives us a better understanding of where to lead the project, and it's 22 data points that we simply didn't have prior.

To make things even more transparent, we decided to share the results and the process with the community, in hopes of helping other OSS maintainers: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E-gIa-EV7i3qrfajoIYYOCY1...

If anyone has any feedback on the process (and the next features we should develop!) I'll be really happy to hear it :)




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