Comments on: How do you count your community size?

By: Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » Designing an obstance course

Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » Designing an obstance course — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:04:58 +0000

[...] that a new contributor to your project jump through some hoops to learn the ways of the community. Communities are layered according to involvement, and the trust which they earn through their involvement. You don’t [...]

By: thp

thp — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:46:45 +0000

cat /path/to/maemo-community-mailing-list-archives/*.mbox | grep “^From:” | sort | uniq | wc -l

(and do the same for the other mailing lists)

By: Dave Neary

Dave Neary — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:59:25 +0000

Hi Jeff,

Indeed, I’m familiar with the 1/9/90 proportions. I would go further and talk about 0.1/0.9/9/90 – the 0.1 is the tiny proportion of your community that contributes the majority of the code, the 0.9 contributes the rest of the code and everything else which makes your project a nice product (translations, docs, packaging, bug fixes, …).

I don’t think many projects beats the 1-9-90 construct – perhaps some projects which are destined for developers like, say, Zope get a slightly larger developer community (what you might call the ecosystem) compared to its user population (but then it all depends on how you define users, I guess). What some projects do succeed in doing is growing the size and variety of the 0.1 in the middle, and growing all of the other segments in consequence. Including the number of end users.

Cheers,
Dave.

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:47:11 +0000

I think where you draw the line for each ‘class’ gets really difficult.

I saw a talk this past week which presented this sort of thing as a community pyramid to set expectations on project health.

1% – developers:
code/content that ships as
parts of “releases”

official docs, translations can
fit in here

9% – feedback:
mailinglists, forums, bugs,
testers, triage

They close the loop between
consumption and creation. They
inform the development path,
but do not choose it.

90% – users:
consumers who use the
output of the other 10%

Does that pyramid concept hold up?
Are the healthiest projects able to “top load” their project and beat the 1-9-90 construct?

That 90 % is a pretty touch metric to get a handle on in open projects. But can projects get a sense of that 1-9 split in the top 10% in the pyramid. Are the healthiest projects close to that mark? Can you have too many developers compared to feedback? You can certainly have too few.

-jef