Accepting New Members

How should members be selected? Should membership be open to all, up to a pre-decided membership limit? What barriers to entry should exist, if any? For a organization without leaders, I think there are limited choices in the early stages of a Blog Coop. Though all members are equal, it is reasonable to assume that Blog Coops will have one or more founders (Blog Coops won't spontaneously come into existance). Being a 'founder' does not impart any special power or rights, however, and I don't think the process should be started with founders acting as 'hiring managers'. Rather, the founders should have a high-level idea about the type and scope of business. People with experience are invited to join. So membership is open to anyone, but with a "qualified people only"-type of honor system. Once members join and begin to interact, the reputation system kicks in, and members begin to build a reputation in the group. Over time, the organization may choose to review certain memberships, and some members may be voted out for a number of reasons.

I think there should be as little barrier to entry as possible.

So long as compensation is only given for contributions and reputation, people should be totally free to contribute if they so choose.

After all, if there contributions are not valued, they wont get anything.

Of course, some contributions can be disruptive and unwanted, so there has to be some way of existing groups to reject new members and to de-select existing ones.

One commonly used method is that, in order to join, new applicants must be invited by existing members (and sometimes seconded by another).

De-selection could be based on reputation falling below a certain level (but what level - below average for x months?), or contributions being too irregular (no activity for x months?).

Josef, I like both of these ideas.

An invitation/sponsorship scheme could be an effective way to avoid disruptive and non-serious members. And the reputation system could be used to trigger "membership reviews" for existing members.

Mark, glad you like them.

Of course, in order to be as open as possible, there should be a way for people to 'apply for an invitation' - a bit like sending a covering letter explaining why they want to join and what they think they could offer to the community.

The site it would say something like "membership of the blog coop is by invitation only, but if you really want to join NOW, and are really serious about becoming an active member of our community, you can apply for an invitation by clicking here"

Existing members could set their profile to either accept applications or not. That way, if they didn't want to be bothered by invitation requests (for whatever reason), they wouldn't be.

Maybe if all members set their profile to 'no invite applications', then *no* invite applications would be accepted and the "apply for an invitation" bit wouldn't be displayed at all.

As soon as someone new is needed (perhaps to fulfill a specific task, or start a new project), whoever it is that wants help would change their profile and invitations would again be allowed.

I like that idea too, Josef.

I want to do a number of things with this site:

1) Start adding / editing the sections with good ideas like these.

2) Track those changes so everyone can see what has changed.

3) Add the ability to for visitors to start their own discussion threads (I have already created the CGI to work with MT to do this, I just need to set it up for this site)

4) Start using the home page more like a conventional blog, posting news, information on new and existing blog coops and similar organizations, etc. To this, I will probably need to move the current entires to a sub-page.