[Osmf-talk] 13k OSMF members by end of 2010?

[Matthias Urlichs]

Hi,

Nick Black:
> Definitely.  Also, look at SOTM.  100 people in the first year when we  
> had around 10,000 people in OSM and 250 in this year whith 130,000.   
> Newcomers to OSM are less engaged than older mappers - that worries  
> me.

I don't see a problem. Of course newcomers are "less engaged"; part of
the reason may be that their priorities are different ("Mapping is fun",
"A friend of a friend is going, so why should I?"), part simply because
early adopters are more motivated to contribute - almost by definition.
:-P

The same thing happens in other volunteer organizations. One typical way
to cope with this is to scale mandatory participation with a fractional
power of the number of members, not simply proportionally.

Debian, for instance, uses the square root of the number of developers
to decide whether votes are quorate etc.

> To keep a healthy community we need to keep adapting and keep  
> welcoming new people in.
> 
That I do agree with.

-- 
Matthias Urlichs  |  {M:U} IT Design @ m-u-it.de  |   smurf at smurf.noris.de
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