Dashboards for Everyone

(This is rough sketch. I need a template for doing this better.)

Summary

Input collects sentiment data on Mozilla products. Currently, this data can be seen on the front page dashboard. This dashboard sucks for a variety of reasons amongst which is that it's a slog of data that isn't particularly informative.

Further, it's pretty clear that the greater Mozillaverse has different informational needs. Some people are interested in issues with products in specific locales. Some people are interested in today's hot topic. Some people are interested in comparing the first week after release of one version of a product with another. Etc.

Given that, we have two paths:

1. Create dashboards that live on Input catering to all these needs.
2. Create an API that allows people to create their own dashboards and host them wherever.

These two paths aren't mutually exclusive. However, I want to put effort into the second one first for the following reasons:

1. It enables people to individually and collectively solve their own informational problems.
2. It enables people to solve informational problems as problems crop up rather than wait for Input developers to have time to write up a dashboard.
3. As people are solving their informational problems, we'll learn a lot more about what informational problems exist which will guide how we build dashboards that live on Input.

The Dashboards for Everyone project aims to create the infrastructure for enabling people to write their own dashboards for Input data.

Status

• Project owner: Will Kahn-Greene
• Status: in-progress

History

• June 26th, 2014: In a fit of inspiration, Will threw together the initial GET API and a proof-of-concept dashboard.
• July 17th, 2014: Will decided this project has legs and turned it into a real project.
• October 6th, 2014: Will blogged about the completion of v1: http://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/mozilla/input_d4e.html

Requirements

v1 (2014q3)

Requirements:

1. API endpoint for retrieving data: /api/v1/feedback/
   • public API for anyone to use
   • allows filtering for the data on locale, product, version, etc
   • capped at X results
   • throttled at X requests per hour
   • must NOT show private information
2. unit tests for the API
3. documentation for using the API
4. proof-of-concept dashboards that people can fork and extend
5. a bunch of big, loud "COME AND GET IT!" blog posts as well as pushing it in other venues and soliciting/begging others to write some dashboards

Anti-requirements:

1. not going to provide authenticated access to the API
2. this is a prototype to get all our ducks in a row--it doesn't need to be perfect and we expect to make it better for the next iteration
3. we do not want to host other peoples' dashboards on input.mozilla.org for security reasons; if that becomes a problem, there are other safer options

Current proof-of-concept dashboards:

• Happy feedback: http://bl.ocks.org/willkg/c4d5a272f86ae4510750
• Happy vs. Sad broken down by locale for Firefox OS: http://bl.ocks.org/willkg/e6013b21ec16d5e8192a
• Happitude comparison: http://bl.ocks.org/iankronquist/90f68ed445f804e63cdb

Bugs:

Tracker bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1040773

2 Total; 0 Open (0%); 2 Resolved (100%); 0 Verified (0%);

Future possibilities

If v1 gains traction, there will be a bunch of dashboards out there and Input should grow a curated index of interesting dashboards.