I just realized the Catalyze Community officially opened our doors to the public in a sneak preview on June 4, 2007. So, today is our FIRST ANNIVERSARY!
In the last year, we have grown from about 100 members to almost 3,800 members. Over the last year, the Catalyze community site has had 68,000 visitors, 37,000 unique visitors and served up 293,000 pageviews. Visitors have also averaged 4 1/2 minutes per visit.
I got to thinking about Catalyze this morning because of a blog post from sometime Catalyze blogger Craig Brown who recently published the results of an informal survey of business analyst communities.
I want to share my response to his blog post:
Here's why the Catalyze community is different (and better) than the other BA communities:
Definition AND Design - We don't think you can separate the definition and design aspects of developing software or websites. For example, 45% of our members are business analysts and 27% are usability professionals with the rest scattered among product managers, project managers, software engineers and others. We believe that the interplay and different points of view are essential to developing a vibrant community to advance both the business analyst and usability professions.
Community Openness - Catalyze also embraces more community openness than the other communities. For example, anyone can view content on Catalyze without registering or logging in. Registration or logging in is only required if you want to post to a discussion or blog, or upload content. Speaking of content, Catalyze is the only community that easily permits members to upload content. We are also very open on our statistics and share our growth numbers publicly on the site.
Better content - We may be biased on this front, but we think we offer the best content of any business analyst site. We do host monthly webcasts that are well-attended, and we post recordings and slides back into the community to build the knowledgebase. And you can easily search for content via search terms or tags.
Commercial free! - Finally, Catalyze is the only commercial-free business analyst community site. All of the other communities are pushing an agenda, whether it is conference participation, services, profit motive, etc.
In any case, it's good to have competition because that pushes each community to do their best to deliver on their vision. And it's good to have different opinions, and I encourage people to check out each of the sites for themselves.
And a special thank you to all of the faithful and active Catalyze members who have been critical to our growth and viabiltiy.