Tom, if you ask me... yes.
Since the OpenACS doesn't have 60% market share, we can't really be too selective about who wants to help out. Anybody that adds some elbow grease to the project should be encouraged to be greater participants in the community. I propose that this encouragement should be in the form of being empowered to help choose the community's leadership.
I'm not sure what reasons there are for being selective and elitist about who is an OACS citizen. Presumably it's so that we don't become bureacratic and ineffective.
But we have over 400 outstanding bugs, suggestions and todos in the bug tracker, 100 more open bugs than closed bugs. And that's only because I went and closed all the bugs that have been resolved for more than 3 months.
We're also still considered an insular community where outsiders don't know how to become more involved. There is at least one developer who has submitted a rather critical package that hasn't made it into CVS for an unknown reason.
Not to mention we're still not very well known in the FOSS community.
So it doesn't seem that we are so efficient that we need to protect our core business approach.
From my perspective, we need to come up with a radical way to get people to buy in. I think if someone joins the Right (or preferrably the Left if you're of my political persuasion) Way of OACS they should be welcomed and encouraged to get even more involved.
That being said, my suggestions above about giving people zorkmints for relatively objective contributions - things relating to bugs, helpful postings to the boards, improving documentation, etc. I would even say that people can get their first zorkmint the first time they register or download the OACS.
They become OACS citizens only after they've gathered enough zorkmints. Btw, I would advocate that only current OACS citizens can dole out zorkmints.
talli
