[Koha-devel] Proposal of a new development for Marseille hackfest, feedback needed

[Paul Poulain]

Hi koha-devel,

There are sometimes debates about how and who is using Koha, how it is
setup, which decision is of general interest.
I had 2 ideas that could be developed during the hackfest. 2 of BibLibre
developers are very motivated by the idea, anyone else can join us ;-)

**** 1st idea : collecting -anonymous- data on staff interface usage
We sometimes are wondering whether librarians are running an old version
of IE, or if they have a large screen, or if the page X is often run or not.
There's a tool that could let us know: piwik (BibLibre already has an
offer on Piwik for the OPAC)
The idea here would be to add piwik for staff interface, and collect all
datas on a single piwik instance.
We made something (quick) for one of our current supported library, just
to see what kind result we could get. We're quite happy with the
performances, datas are interesting (which browser is used, which screen
size, which pages. [ For example, the library runs an average of 40
times "reports/catalogue-stats.pl" every day (yes, that's crazy ;-) ).
This page is worth being optimized !!! ]

The only caveat we've seen for now is that it can be tricky to have many
websites pointing to the same piwik database.
We also are not completely peaceful with having 10 000 librarians
calling the server. We could face a heavy load...

But that's worth investigating imo.

(for those who don't know what is piwik, it's like google analytics, but
respect your privacy ;-) Ah, and it's a software developed by a frenchy,
living in new zealand, that has office hosted by catalystNZ afaik)
If the community likes the idea, we will ask him for any advice on the 2
caveats we fear.
[ PS: please avoid starting a troll about piwik collecting anonymous
data or not because of the IP. Anyway, the feature will be trigger-able
by the library. ]

**** 2nd idea : collecting nominative datas.
We very often face the question "how many libraries are using Koha"
So the idea is to have a form that let the library declare itself.
Library name, type (academic, public,...), country,...
We could also collect other data, like catalog size, systempreferences
values to be able to make statistics.

Example of answers we could get:
 * how many libraries are using Koha in Africa ?
 * What's the average catalog size ? Which library is the largest one ?
 * Is someone/how many libraries are using the "insecure" mode
(syspref=insecure set to "Yes") ? [ If no, we can drop it ! ]

Each library could choose to share or not the data (and maybe which
level of data. One could accept to declare itself & share sysprefs, but
not appear on nominative listings for example)
A specific website could be made to display informations, either
nominative or not.

Do you like those ideas ?

PS: BibLibre is of course willing to host piwik and "statistics" servers.
-- 
Paul POULAIN - BibLibre
http://www.biblibre.com
Free & Open Source Softwares for libraries
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