Levels of Participation

This is a lesson part of the module The Web Economy out of the Open Source ERP/Executive Diploma course conducted by a private university.

Topics

There are different type of user participation in any online project.
They are
- Lurkers - who only reads and hardly said a word or contribute anything. They comprise a high percentage of visitors and contribute to the hitrate.
- Trolls - who lurks but occasionaly fire up.
- Newbies - who are new and would try to ask around and get what they want.
- Geeks - those who are experts and may be busy or impatient to answer too many questions. But they are the most helpful in a forum or project
- Poison - those who may divert the attention of a project with drawn out arguments or debates.
Debian^[1] was a highly succesful project with 1,000 developers and faces issues^[2] giving rise to forks such as Ubuntu^[3].
Information is free, people are not, contributors are priceless^[4].

See if you can identify any such character in the SourceForge project.
Research for literature about such behaviour and discuss the interesting and important points
Find out how best to convert lurkers to more active users.
Investigate what is happening with Debian and its forks, and if there are more recent ideas on better community management.
When you given free information in forums, sometimes users still bother your time privately and refuse to go through public forums. What should you do?

Publish your works in an attractive manner in your user page, stating your own views and findings providing links to your sources. Use the talk page here to score marks.
Create or edit sub-pages of course materials within wikiversity.
Discuss in the forum (link shall be provided) by offering your ideas and answering or comment on others' postings.

(Provided by Students - subject to edit ranking by tutor)

(Provided by Students - subject to edit ranking by tutor)

(Done in wikiversity as course material by the students under the guidance of the tutor)