Success is often the worst enemy of FOSS projects. When the growth curve gets too steep, if the project managers have not streamlined their work, they can get overwhelmed. Innovation slows to a crawl, consensus becomes more difficult to reach, admin tasks steal creative energy and time to just think about the meaning of it all evaporates. Supporting the bright community programmers is critical. If they are happy, even if the major version releases slow down, there are still a healthy number of new plugins. So care and feeding of the coders is very important. You know the founders are getting overwhelmed when they don't post news updates; they are too busy working to talk about it. Of course that gives the opposite impression, that nothing is going on, the project loses momentum and people lose confidence.

Baba

Yes this seems to be a starting problem in Elgg community site. If you see the about Elgg page, only 30% of the people there are even registered in Elgg Community site. The group owner of the Elgg discussion group, left about two months ago, and things like that.

We need to contact whoever is available in the core team, and invite the to this group, we have several ideas on how to make the community experience better. I have emailed Dave Tosh, but we need someone with more time on this site, who is more trustworthy to contact the Elgg core team and let them know that we can help them with tons of ideas and implementing them.

Regards,
Uddhava dasa

Well, our community-building experience may or may not be applicable to a FOSS project. But the hurdle we have consistently faced is getting the community members to take responsibility for creating quality content. We solved that by building an online school (using Moodle, but oh well...) for training them in our philosophy and practices, and how to share them using the effective style that we built up over many years of experience.

We found that it is far better for the user experience to have a few very well trained and productive users than many, many poor-quality users. The unenthusiastic users suck the life and energy out of the community and overwhelm the admins with stupid, trivial questions. So any community must establish some threshold to becoming a member, depending on the specific criteria of the group. In a FOSS community, there is a sharp distinction between users and contributors.

There should be some resistance, some friction involved in becoming a community member. Marketing guru Seth Godin writes "The paradox is obvious: to grow, you need to remove friction from the medium. If it's not easy and free to use, people won't. But then it gets big and it becomes profitable, so people use it too much. ... Friction rewards intent and creates scarcity." We estabish barriers to entry, some friction that rewards the more persistent and motivated users. This is key to a really high quality community that rewards you with a net gain of energy.

Baba

I agree, this is the best approach to quality. I guess that people interested in cheating might go for the masses and google ads. But anyone creating a serious social site will want to have quality users.

Elgg suffers from this in their forums for example.

Here's a good blog article called "1,000 True Fans" talks about the concept of quality users:

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize.

First the class, then the mass.

Regards,
Uddhava

I don't know if there is a popular need for this or not but my church is interested in using elgg for many different reasons.  We have a lot of members that are not able to get to our church services due to health reasons so we will be making really good use of elgg.  One thing that I think is missing though is a way to share messages.  Blogging works but is a little to bulky.

Is there a way to show the title of the sermons and scripture passages as links and when you click on the link it will open to the message and also next to the link it has an option to listen to the podcast or mp3. and is there a way to integrate this with video as well?

also.  the events calandar...
Is there a way to add Locations to it such as: City, State, Zip code for like a city guide?  I would like to find a way to link all the church's together and have a central place to link all of the activities together such as Gospel singings, Revivals, Missionaries etc...