Re: Gnome community

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:58:53 +0100, David Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Toady wrote:
> > To me, we can get it from the number of opened bugzilla accounts, what
> > do you think ?
> 
> That would be a huge number - perhaps bugzilla accounts where
> someone changed a bug or created a bug in the past year or 18
> months might be a better number. GNOME bugzilla has been around
> for a long time, recently I saw that there are something like 300
> people with bugmaster permissions...

You'd want a variety of numbers to judge this-
from bugzilla:
* number of bugzilla accounts (49790 as of right now)
* number of unique bug-buddy submission emails (32779 as of right now,
6588 in the past year, a perhaps troubling decline, or perhaps showing
we're less crashy than we used to be.)

indicating that roughly 80,000 people have participated at some point
through bugzilla- a huge, healthy number.

numbers I can't get you, and which will be smaller, but will also give
ideas on the size of the community:

* number of cvs accounts, number of active cvs accounts in the last year
* number of unique email addresses in changelogs from the last year
* number of foundation members
* number of unique readers of planet.gnome
* number of subscribers to gnome-list, desktop-devel-list, and
gnome-hackers, and number of posters to each of those in the past year

The important thing to know is that there is no fixed 'community'-
there are varying levels of involvement and commitment, and each of
these numbers I've suggested will speak to different groups.

[As an aside, I'll definitely use that 80K number in my own
discussions, with the proper caveats- it does show an upper bound for
the number of people who have contributed.]

Luis