Thanks Bawolff for your feedback! It's great, as it helps me think even more about it!
I gather from what you said above that your specialty is in-person
events,
More the combination of in-person events with unfocused (unaware of themselves) existing web communities. OrsayCommons for example (more here: http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/julien-dorra/) was actually a series of live photo-streaming events happening both inside the Orsay museum, and, of course, on Twitter. Online and offline were indissociable in event series, and it allowed us to focus a community of museum & photo lovers against the ban on picture taking in this museum.
Also, my co-organizers and I always try to include online participants during the in-person hackatons event. It's hard! It's actually a huge part of the new event organization for Museomix 2012 (random fact: we had two wikipedians at Museomix 2011)
So there is multiple ways to combine realspace and cyberspace: you can build your realspace event as a focal moment where participants produce and share online. You could design your event with hooks and touchpoints for online participants.
but perhaps it would be interesting to have virtual events of
some sort via IRC focusing on a very fine grained topic. I'm not sure how exactly that would work, but I think it might be interesting.
Virtual events could take the form of challenges like Ludum Dare, or the monthly Mozilla Dev derby. I would argue that the strength of online is in asynchronous events, where people from all timezone can participate. Having a continuously open channel during a challenge is a good idea. People can then come and ask question, be mentored by some 'elders'…
One thing that I'd love to see exploited more is Etherpad-like (or Google Docs-like) simultaneous, realtime writing. The simple act of writing collectively in realtime is exhilarating and put you in a incredible flow state. I think there is a lot of potential for documentation sprints here. If you never tried to write an article or a blog post in realtime with one or more others, you should do it! It's a beautiful experience that is literally impossible to live with paper or a single computer.
(Related to realtime writing: Unishared is a very young startup that want to push every university students to take class notes live, collaboratively and publicly! Nice goal)
I personally think (and I imagine many people think differently), that perhaps retention rather than recruitment is what should be focused on.
Yes, retention is a key issue. Also, ramping up people from casual participation to more and more complex involvement. Giving people a path, new goals, new focus.
In any case, any community also have to account for people leaving or more frequently just gradually winding down their participation (like, when they become parents, or take a new job). I had that experience myself in 2009, when I was very active in the local Drupal community, helping gather people, find sponsors for a big event -- and then had to step down from my community roles, because of… my second daughter :-)
After all, we power wikipedia. Wikipedia has a huge user base, some of which know how to program, and many of those will at the very least look our way, even if they don't explicitly drop in and say hi. Those are the people we should attract. Even though probably 90% of our contributor base come from a wiki project, I still think this is a vastly untapped pool. People generally join open source projects to scratch an itch (so the saying goes). The Wikipedians (not to mention the oft neglected sister projects) are the one's who would be itchy.
I remember John Resig (from jQuery) saying: "Treat every user as a potential contributor".
Very Wikipedian, isn't it? Wikipedia does of course treat every reader as a contributor by nature for the content!!
* Question for you all: On the technical side, from your experience, what would make an user/visitor/editor feel she/he *is* a potential tech contributor, not just a potential content contributor?
In many ways I've noticed a trend where it seems people on some projects, especially en Wikipedia, treat the foundation as more of a "host" than an entity meant to serve their interests. As a result they start to feel that MediaWiki is a product that is being developed "for" them (in a similar way how something like facebook or google is developed "for" its users) rather than "by" them (or by "their" community). Maybe there was always such setiment, and I just never noticed it in earlier times, but I find such sentiment disturbing. I think in order to best reach out to new contributors, we need to start at home so to speak.
Yes, from my experience too people tend to rapidly put themselves in "consumer mode" :-) I suppose it's (for the moment!) the default mode and we have to make a conscious and specific effort to get them out of that "consumer mode".
* Question for you all: do you have an example of this "consumer mode" behavior on the software part of Wikimedia? How have you dealt with it in the past?
* Bawolff a question just for you, could you elaborate on the idea of "starting at home"?
Julien