Every day, millions of people connect with ideas, photos, and other content on WordPress.com. Here at Automattic, we take pride in enabling this interaction, and continually strive to make the WordPress.com platform better for users.

Our data science team examines these user interactions, and aims to develop our insights into user facing features and tools. With this challenge, we decided to open up some of our work and share with the community some of the questions we are excited about.

On our platform, and across the Web, the question of social reciprocity is one of the most interesting. How does platform design, user content, and social activity combine and affect user engagement?

We are running this visualization challenge on the Databits.io platform, where we’re inviting anyone who’s obsessed with data like we are to come up with some interesting visualizations of the following scenarios. We’re offering a $1,000 prize for the best one!

Two ideas we’d love to see explored are

• User-to-user social reciprocity. The provided data is sufficiently rich to explore the dynamics of user-to-user social interactions. Are there compelling stories we can tell about how individual users react to other users’ actions on the platform, temporally? How does blog posting and the kind of blogging content enter the picture?
• User-to-community social reciprocity. There are actions that users send to the broader WordPress community and also records of the community generating social interactions on the users’ blogs. On the scale of user to community interaction, are there patterns that can help understand social reciprocity? Does the interaction depend on blog posting? What are the temporal dynamics?

Read more about the data, the challenge, and the prizes being offered for the best visualizations over at Databits.io.

If you love data like we do, consider joining our team! We’re currently hiring Data Wranglers.