User:Mchua/Braindumps/Community program

Disclaimer

This is a stub. Also read User:Mchua/Braindumps/Support_gang for a more detailed outline proposal that's very much related - this is beyond support-gang, though.

Overview

A "community membership" structure - some sort of recognition that regular contributors can apply to, a status symbol with benefits. Only active contributors would have this distinction and the privs therein.

Dangers

These are the reasons why I hesitate to write this proposal in the first place.

• A community program is inherently centralizing, and people may be disinclined to create and contribute to local communities if there's shininess on this end... how can we make it not a bottleneck?

Benefits

• a community.laptop.org email forwarding address (mchua@community.laptop.org)
• userpage badge
• a vote on certain matters (what matters? I don't know)
• if they're really incredibly good, have an 'academy awards' type nomination each year, with tshirts sent to the winners
• Biz cards that say "member" see this similar idea
• IRC hostmasks like "olpc/member/foo"

Why we should

• attract and retain devoted contributors
• have a known pool of good people to ping on projects, opportunities, etc - this is a useful group to delineate!
• a useful mental construct for newcomers to aim towards, and for people to help them attain - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Admin_coaching