Video of talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzMwwLfvh5g The Analytics team at Wikimedia has been busy exploring dashboarding and ways to display Wikipedia editor data. We found that while most people focus on visualization, data access and information architecture are just as important and separate problems. In this talk we share our learnings from developing dashiki (https://github.com/wikimedia/analytics-dashiki), our new dashboard stack. We will talk about why we believe a server-less javascript app was the right architecture for the problem, how with about 900 lines of javascript we transform data into Vega grammar, and how knockout components helped us stay modular.

1. The
Dashboarding
Problem

2. Analytics team at Wikimedia Foundation

3. Easily Visualize
Editor Engagement
for all Wikimedia
projects
Goal:

4. Explore
Side Goal:
Dashboarding
Technologies

5. Date project pages created
20140101 arwiki 50
20140102 arwiki 40
…
20140101 dewiki 100
20140102 dewiki 200

6. Problem #1

7. Problem #1
Access to
Data

8. Everyone should
have access!
Easily Visualize
Editor Engagement
for all Wikimedia
projects

9. Problem #1
Public Access
to Data

10. Problem #2
Visualization

13. Visualization is
an easier
problem than
data access

18. Problem #3

19. Problem #3
Information
Architecture

20. How do you
explore data for
more than 800
projects?

22. http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/#secondary-graphs-tab

24. #1 Access to Data
#2 Visualization
#3 Information
Architecture

25. #1 Access to Data
#2 Visualization
#3 Information
engineering
Architecture
design

26. #3 Information
Architecture
Design knows best

27. https://metrics.wmflabs.org/static/public/dash/

28. #1 Access to Data

29. Tech Decision:
Make all data
available via
HTTP

30. https://metrics.wmflabs.org/static/public/datafiles/

31. Data is available
in JSON format

32. {
"result": {
"Sum": {
"newly_registered": {
"2014-08-26 00:00:00": 364.0,
"2014-08-24 00:00:00": 331.0,
"2014-08-21 00:00:00": 382.0,
"2014-08-30 00:00:00": 383.0,
"2014-09-25 00:00:00": 372.0,
"2014-08-22 00:00:00": 367.0,
"2014-09-24 00:00:00": 410.0,
"2014-09-06 00:00:00": 370.0,
"2014-09-09 00:00:00": 370.0,
"2014-09-27 00:00:00": 321.0,
"2014-09-05 00:00:00": 317.0
}
}
},
"parameters": {
"Cohort": "arwiki",
"Created On": "2014-09-13 00:00:00",
"Metric_end_date": "2014-09-13 00:00:00",
"Metric_start_date": "2014-09-12 00:00:00",
"Cohort Size": 0,
"Metric": "NewlyRegistered"
}
}
Includes
metadata

33. Data is available
to everyone.

34. Why not?...
Server-less

35. Why not?...
Server-less
What is the middle
tier for anyways?

36. Decouples
visualization
piece from data
gathering piece
No
authentication
needed
Server-less

38. We are
server-less,
we need to
store the
bootstrap
state of the
dashboard
somewhere

39. https://metrics.wmflabs.org/static/public/dash/
{
"defaultProjects": [
"enwiki", "eswiki", "dewiki", "frwiki", "ruwiki",
"jawiki", "itwiki"
],
"defaultMetrics": [
"RollingActiveEditor", "NewlyRegistered"
]
}

40. Any other
data store.
Yours?

41. Technology Stack

42. Must Haves:
Package Manager
Dependency Loading
Data Binding Library
DOM manipulation and ajax
Testing

43. Technology Stack
Micro libraries: “each library does
1 thing well”

44. > Bower install

46. https://metrics.wmflabs.org/static/public/dash/

48. The
Of Knockout
Components

49. Knockout is
not
Polymer

50. Reusable
pieces

52. Show me the code….

55. Dashiki: a thin wrapper on
top of OS technology +
information architecture.
We can use dashiki to build
other dashboards.

56. https://github.com/wikimedia/analytics-dashiki

57. Lessons:
Server-less = Reduced complexity
Easy(est) to deploy
CORS
No error log for now
Bootstrap default state
Keep things simple. No authentication.

58. Questions?