Analytics/Archive/Editor Engagement Vital Signs/Dashboard

Intro
This document describes our technology choices for the Editor Engagement Vital Signs Dashboard. The dashboard is the tool by which we will surface the new metrics. Our goal when developing the dashboard is two fold:

1. Give users a easy UI to visualize and find the new editor metrics from data created by Analytics/Wikimetrics

2. Explore technologies (visualization and otherwise) towards building a replacement of our current dashboarding tool.

And our third "bonus" goal: Provide a dashboard stack that can be used by other developers at the foundation to 'easily' showcase their data.

What this project is not
The dashboard is not solving several problems we are aware we have at Wikimedia when it comes to dashboard discovery and dashboard creation. It is just a first step towards solving dashboard and metric discovery for the EEVS metrics.

The dashboard does not solve the hardest problem of all when it comes to visualization of data and that is the 'data access'. We assume all data we want to display is public and available. Analytics/Wikimetrics is the tool that creates the data files we are visualizing. The non trivial process of how that data comes to be has documentation of its own. You can find wikimetrics code on [github].

Components
The dashboard looks like the following:



A prototype of the dashboard can be found here: http://pauginer.github.io/prototypes/analytics-dashboard/index.html

The dashboard has two different components: Browsing and Visualization. Besides choosing a visualization framework we need a basic UI stack to be able to create the browsing components. Not only that we need some kind of storage to configure our UI to - for example- display a set of projects that can be browsed by language. We have detailed below our technology choices. We have also included an adendum of other things we have looked at that did not made our final cut.