On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 15:25 -0600, Ken Causey wrote:
> We now have 342 users registered at
> 
> http://people.squeakfoundation.org
> 
> of those 68 have never been certified by anyone and I suspect a large
> number of those are invalid/non-Squeak community accounts.
> 

Hi, 

I spent a little time the last week looking at people.squeakfoundation.
I'm a developer which has now about 12 years of experience in 
programming. I'm monitoring squeak since 1998. And now I got the
chance to do a real project with squeak, seaside,....

My experience with people.squeakfoundation is the following. I
don't remember when I signed up. Signing up is exciting every
time you do because you like to be a part of it.
But in my opinion people.squeakfoundation is very frustrating
at first place. You can sign up easily but then you are stuck.
You can do nothing being an Observer. Why should I come back?
I recognized this reading your article complaining about the actual
status of the site. Being an Observer I couldn't post an answer
to your article. Why should I use the side? Should I come back
every week looking if someone was willing to raise my status? But
then I write down which projects I like while I'm not able to 
click on the projects as you suppose being an Observer.

You wrote about the misuse of the login name. But then why is 
there a choice for the username? Wouldn't it be feasible to 
use the combination FirstnameLastname as login account? For
me I find your critics right but I can't change my username
to something more known (ok I'm still unknown :) ). I think the
only thing people know is the email address and possibly the
real name of other people. This is my guess thinking that most
of the people know each other from the mailing list.

I think there is more to fix then the usage of the users.

My two cents,

Norbert