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

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Wed Feb 17 23:32:49 UTC 2010


On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 03:58:32PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> 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.

In some writing he's been doing lately, Greg DeKoenigsberg has offered
this definition: A contributor is someone a community actively relies
upon for help.  Someone who makes a regular contribution of some
number of edits per month would fall into this category, while someone
who only does one or two changes ever would be less like a contributor
and more like a casual participant (I think Greg called this role
"collaborator").


-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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