On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Nathan Hurst wrote:
bulia byak wrote:
Nathan, let me respectfully disagree.
Can we stop treating this as a commercial project whose main aim is to maximise user base? I've been on such projects before, and they usually die a horrible death.
If a project has managed to gain a good user base, it doesn't already sound like "horrible death" to me, regardless of what lies ahead. Projects that die _without_ users look much more pitiful.
Yes, that's why I want balance. I am saying that making the aim 'lots of users' is bad. You're saying 'making no users is bad'. I'm trying to say "Lets not emphasize user base, rather get things done." This means that if a decision is between more users or easier for developers, I say we take the easier for developers option.
Bryce? You've been quiet so far.
njh
Another comment on the subject of userbase size, to back up Nathan's point.
In the MUD development community there was some observations that contrary to the MMORPG philosophy of "bigger is better", in reality it seemed that the best MUD communities were of around 200-300 people. The thinking is that less than that the number of opportunities to build relationships were smaller, whereas above that, there were too many people so most folks you randomly ran into were not people you knew so it wasn't worth the effort to build the new relationships with them.
I suspect similar reasons are behind why overly successful open source projects change or even die due to userbase overload. We want a good userbase - large enough to make things interesting but not so huge that we have to spend an undesireable amount of our time doing tech support.
The metric I'm watching for this is the size of the inkscape-devel mailing list; when it hits 200-300 I will assume we're at the sweet spot. Based on the volume of list traffic I think we're already pretty close. :-)
Bryce