I came across this old post from the Django project, "Measuring the Django Community: Circles of Django"
http://jacobian.org/writing/django-community/circles-of-django/ It looks like an interesting approach and worth doing on a periodic basis, once or twice a year, a census of sorts. Obviously participation in the project comes in various ways and in various degrees of engagement. I think of it as a pyramid: Users -- at the based of the pyramid we have the users of OpenOffice. This can be estimated from our download numbers. Engaged users -- Next level of the pyramid are users who have engaged with the project at one level or another. This might be by following us on Twitter, by signing up for a mailing list, posting a question to the forums, etc. These can all be measured. It is probably on the order of 15,000. (We have over 9000 users signed up for our announcement mailing list, for example) Contributors -- These are those who have contributed to the project. This includes code contributions, obviously, but beyond patches also bug reports, translations strings, wiki edits, helping others on support forum or user list, contributing logos and ideas on marketing list. These can all be measured, though it is harder since it is spread across many systems and there is duplication across these systems. This is probably on the order of 500. Committers -- those who have made sustained contributions of merit and have been voted in as committers. We have 122 committers. This could be visualized as pyramid, or concentric circles ("onion diagram") or maybe some other ways. Could make a good blog post. >From a recruitment perspective, it also makes sense to consider what is required to encourage progress, e.g., converting users into engaged users, or engaged users into contributors, etc. Regards, -Rob
