Response to "Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop"

Máirín Duffy duffy at fedoraproject.org
Wed Feb 17 20:58:32 UTC 2010


On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 19:39 +0100, Joerg Simon wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 February 2010 19:24:58 inode0 wrote:
> > * An increase in the number of people downloading Fedora could also
> > increase the number of new potential contributors.
> 
> What we see in Ambassadors very often is, that People want to belong to the 
> Fedora Project and use Fedora Ambassadors as a Starter Group - which we are 
> not - and we can see from the mentoring, that we have to reject a lot for 
> certain valid reasons
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/SteeringCommittee/ReportTemplate#Mentoring
> 
> Maybe we should think about an entry Level FAS Group "Fedora Users" so people 
> can join without any barrier and start and belong to something and crow into 
> the project? Sure there will be a lot fan-boy's but all these people are also 
> potential contributors.
> 
> Thanks for working on this important Topic!

We need to define what a contributor is for purposes of our 'study' here
then. Is a contributor someone who makes 1 single wiki edit and nothing
else? Is a contributor someone who makes 1 single wiki edit and a
wallpaper design? Is a contributor someone who hacks the kernel? Where
on the sliding scale are we cutting off and saying, 'yes you're a
contributor for purposes of this study?'

No judgement, but it's just an important question you bring up that we'd
need to make a decision on. 

Maybe it's timely I happened to see Ben Shneiderman (see the other
thread I just started on this list about that) talk about getting from
consumer to contributor. He analyzed wikipedia contributors, and I
believe they defined contributors to mean 1 single edit or more. So
their definition of 'contributor' is perhaps more expansive than we
might be interested in.

Or maybe we could segment contributors, eg. defined in terms of our wiki
which I understand is way oversimplifying:

- Poke your toe-in-the-water: at least 1 edit up to 25 edits
- Knees-deep: 25 edits to 250 edits
- Waist-deep: 250 edits - 1000 edits
- Shoulders-deep: 1000+ edits

And see if there's a correlation between download numbers and the growth
of each one of those categories rather than just 'contributors in
general'

*If* we're interested in that.

~m



More information about the advisory-board mailing list