Content patch for "care and feeding"
by Joseph Ottinger
These are patches for "community care and feeding," contributed for historical reasons and NOT so they can be integrated. The tone is wrong, on rereading, but I hate to just lose the content.
Here's what it is, if you aren't desperate to read the patches themselves:
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Imagine if you grow a garden and are very ambitious. The first year you overplant and are unwilling to thin out the seedlings. You end up with overcrowded, unhealthy plants.
In practice, communities need to grow at manageable rates, with measurable positive impact. This means that in the formation of a community, you may need to be somewhat discerning in how you accept and promote community members. This also implies that sometimes you need to be willing to demote community members for the sake of how the community operates.
It's important to maintain the community's perspective separately from an individual community member's opinion; a given member may rub someone else the wrong way, or be otherwise difficult to get along with, but still offer valuable contributions. Such a person might find it difficult to be promoted in a community - because a community is, at its heart, a political body - but such a person also shouldn't be demoted or otherwise weeded out (using our gardening analogy) without just cause from the entire community's perspective.
Rely on both contributions and general opinion when deciding to accept or demote community members; if the overall opinion of a promotion is horror and surprise, it's probably not a very good idea. Further, promotion should be based on merit, and not merely opinion (or, as happens often in new projects, desperation for higher user counts).
A careful approach to managing the community establishes a rhythm of growth; careful tending means your community is built of its strongest potential members, which makes for a strong community.
8 years, 7 months