My musings on a post by James McGovern attracted a number of comments, and I want to set the record straight:
The only real point I wanted to make was that opensource communities are not defined by the size of their core. That there will always be a number of people more active than others. And that this is not wrong.c Openness is about equality of access and opportunity, and not measured by the actual number of participants.
I promise to return to some of the other comments later. But while I’m seeking to set the record straight, there was one other thing buzzing around my head while I was in hospital:
As a result of this interview, a number of you commented that I seemed to separate creative people and thinkers from doers and whatever. I made no attempt to separate human beings.
The only point I wanted to make was that blogs suited thinking, wikis suited workflow and reference, and IM suited wisdom-of-crowds problem-solving. An individual is able to use all three modes of conversation.
Enough said.
Your classification of folks is accurate. Consider if an enterprise used the technologies. They would use blogs for sharing of perspectives, status, information sharing while they would use Wikis for knowledge management, flushing out ideas, etc.