Evaluate Plausible web analytics for use by OSPO-supported communities

[jwflory]

Summary

Evaluate Plausible as a tool for open source web analytics, available to any OSPO-supported community.

Background

Recently, I learned about Plausible, an open source web analytics platform that does not collect cookies and complies with privacy law frameworks. It came up in a Fedora Community Operations meeting, in the context of the rockylinux.org website. I thought it was interesting to have a public dashboard for page performance too. This is potentially useful for Fedora because it makes the web analytics we do easier and align better with our community values.

Google Analytics is used today, but it is used inconsistently. Some Fedora contributors have access to the Google Analytics dashboard, but it is behind individual people's accounts and it is not easily accessible to our developers and contributors. Coming up with a better story for our web analytics would be helpful because it can inform Fedora 2028 strategy goals and also be a public resource for use by any team, SIG, or WG in Fedora.

This could be a potentially useful service for OSPO to sponsor for our upstream communities because it aligns with open source and privacy values. There are other communities in our ecosystem using this tool. It also reduces the bus factor by moving away from web analytics on individual's Google accounts. Also, it ditches the invasive aspects of Google Analytics that many upstream contributors are apprehensive about.

Details

• Procurement review: Is this vendor in Red Hat's system? Do we need to onboard them as a new vendor? If we want to use this service, how can we pay for it?
• Community integration review: Looking at various Fedora web properties, what migration work would be needed to deprecate Google Analytics and migrate to Plausible?
• Communication review: How do we communicate about a plan to improve the transparency and privacy protections of our web analytics for Fedora websites?
• Maintainer review: Who is responsible for maintaining the dashboard? Is it limited to OSPO team members or can anyone from our upstream communities support with maintaining the dashboard?

There might be more considerations for this roadmap, but this is a first start.

Outcome

• Improved storytelling about our web traffic in critical Red Hat upstream communities
• Better alignment with tools and services that match Red Hat and upstream community values for free and open source software

[MoralCode]

I believe https://opensourcealternative.to/ also uses plausible web analytics (at least last I checked).

Depending on the usecase, Plausible may be a little on the basic side. Personally I use Matomo, which is a lot closer to google analytics in terms of feature set for more advanced usecases, but may take more configuring if a public dashboard is desireable.