Metrics and Narratives: Measuring Success in Global Science Communities

Quantifying the 'Unquantifiable' in Technical Communities

Proving the Return on Investment (ROI) of a community is notoriously difficult, particularly in highly scientific fields like medicine development. AstraZeneca addressed this by developing a framework that links specific community activities to three core organizational impacts: improvement in organizational efficiency, acceleration of data science impact, and the creation of innovative advantages.

Diversity as a Proxy for Community Health

While participation numbers provide a baseline, AstraZeneca uses more sophisticated metrics to measure the true effectiveness of their "silo-breaking" efforts. A primary metric is the diversity of teams involved . By tracking the number of different functional units participating in a single activity, the community team can measure if they are successfully facilitating cross-pollinated innovation.

As the speaker explained: "We use the number of teams and especially the growth in the number of teams as a proxy metric of measuring the diversity of the communities."

Systematically Collected Anecdotal Evidence