Re: Gnome community

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Luis Villa wrote:
> 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

Actual CVS accounts should be easy - wc -l
/cvs/gnome/CVSROOT/passwd (if you have a shell on cvs.gnome.org).
Active accounts is a bit harder.

> * number of unique email addresses in changelogs from the last year

For which modules? gnome desktop? Developers platform? Fifth toe?
Everything in GNOME CVS? Including or excluding freedesktop?

> * number of foundation members

This one's publically available, and it's quite small:
http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2004/voters.html - 324
elligible voters for the foundation elections. 

There are a good number of people who opt out of the foundation
though, who like the idea of the foundation, butdon't go in for
that kind of thing (I know quite a few people like that).

> * 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 posters we can get from the archives - there must be some
trick to do a uniq on the list over several months, but I haven't
been able to think of it in the last 10 seconds...

> [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.]

For a pretty narrow definition of contributed. That said, Mozilla
used to use talkback figures as a basis for community involvement
in Mozilla development, I don't see why we shouldn't do the same
thing...

The point that was made earlier is a good one, though - there
does appear to be a smallish barrier to entry into the community
from the developer community point of view. It's certainly a lot
lower than on some projects but part of the problem is atht we
have too many ways to talk to each other, so a core hacker group
has to concentrate on the ones that allow the project to best
move forward (or which allow them to get the most work done) -
and that means devel mailing lists, planet gnome as a diffusion
of current cool stuff and "meeting of minds", irc and jabber 
for real-time interraction, and that's about it. I know that I
don't have much time to read gnomedesktop (although it is above
slashdot in my priorities) and I usually don't read comments on
stories at all.

Have we gotten to the stage where we need level 1 community
support, the people who take care of making it easy for people to
talk to each other and get involved, but don't actually do any
hacking? That way, the hackers who don't have the time have a
smaller bunch of people in kind of fuzzily defined areas with 
whom they interract regularly for community interraction stuff 
(the "in" crowd), who spend lots of time nurturing a community
who feels like it's being listened to (the "out" crowd)? 

Someone mentioned KDE - what do they do better than us from this
point of view? Can we change to do that? Do we already have teh
infrastructure, but people don't know about it?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
        David Neary,
        Lyon, France
   E-Mail: bolsh gimp org
CV: http://dneary.free.fr/CV/