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

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Fri Feb 19 17:10:11 UTC 2010


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 07:12:09AM +0530, sankarshan wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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").
> 
> What is the upside of bringing on the new term "collaborator" ? Does
> it help us look at our participant base with more granularity or, does
> it go beyond that ?

I don't think the value is in the term, just the differentiation.  At
the tip of the pyramid are people on whom the community relies for
help.  The larger group of which that group is a subset is made up of
people who make a contribution, but on whom the community is not
actively relying.  

This definition might also have an element of "personally" involved --
i.e. it's not just that the community relies on people doing what
Sankarshan does, it's that they rely on Sankarshan himself to do
that.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com


More information about the advisory-board mailing list