Glynn Foster wrote:
> FWIW, I'd *strongly* advocate that any membership is pro-active.
In the link I included I suggested:
The use case for joining a community becomes:
o create an account on opensolaris.org
o go to a community's web page
o click on "become an observer".
This makes you a Community Member.
To become more involved you need to ask (or be asked) to advance to
Contributer status; then again to become a Core Contributer.
I agree that the contributer stages need to be driven by people asking
to transition; this implies that they get some benefit by being one.
What is that benefit? That is,
What can Members do that non-members can't?
What can Contributers do that Members can't?
What can Core Contributers do that Contributers can't?
(If the answer is only "allowed to participate in more bureaucracy",
I doubt if anyone will want to be promoted.)
This all sounds reasonable - make it *easy* to observe things because
the vast majority of a community is made up of users and watchers;
only a very small percentage (less than 5% in my experience)
will be contributers, and only a few of /those/ will be Core.
In one of the sourceforge projects I'm involved with, the numbers are
300,000 lines of code
1,200 files
200,000 web pages served/month
100,000 project downloads in the last 5 years
3,000 subscribers to the "users" discussion alias
110 contributers
18 core contributers
5 active core contributers
I'm pretty certain that this distribution is typical.
I'm also certain that ON's numbers are wildly atypical,
with thousands of contributers and hundreds of core...
-John
