It's a really difficult question. I know a lot of people are contributing, but that's because in some way they've reached out for help in some way or made some noise. I also know that many people are contributing quietly, in very valuable ways, but it's hard to identify those folks.
This same discussion pops up from time to time on the OpenOffice.org community lists... it wobbles back and forth between do we have any contributors at all to pick from other than a very small core group? to who do we pick out of all the people who have made small but useful contributions. A tough one to resolve. Recognition is important to encourage contributions. Some ideas/brainstorming/braindump...... Draw a line in the proverbial sand and start collecting input from that point.. ie, don't grandfather it and award to the people who stand out right now for whatever reason based on work they did on previous releases. Define specific areas for awards, and make it clear that the awards are for the community contributors. Award areas could be something like... - Factory contributions (development, critical bug fixing) - Build service efforts of some kind - Community projects (like making a live cd) - Documentation contributions (wiki, core docs, tutorials, etc) - Providing consistent helpful responses on mailing lists. - Taking initiative to provide community help/tools outside of the Novell sponsored ones (like building up a successful community forum) Award types: - Cash is nice :-) Maybe follow a similar vein as what the OOo Community Council did in providing grants to people so that they could attend the OOo Conference in Beijing this year (I met several people there who were only able to attend with the money they received via an award for a project they worked on). - Public recognition? I don't know what is good here... but sometimes simple things like the project leads naming people in a newsletter, or general email to the project thanking them for their contributions. Sometimes that is all that is needed. - Free boxed openSUSE releases? Ok, I'm running dry here... someone else's turn to do a brain dump now :-) One thing that seems important in my observations is that those of us paid to work on open source projects have quite a bit of an advantage over the community at large... either in high volume project contributions, or in the ability to attend community events, or some other factor... and that really needs to be taken into consideration in however this is dealt with in the long term. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org