SqP is a bad source of membership as it stands, if you take the time to go look at who would be included and who not. It's just not capturing the right people right now.
There are other issues to consider, in general, when trying to use an automatic reputation system to handle membership. Some issues to keep in mind:
1. What happens when someone's reputation *decreases* past the threshold for membership? 2. There is no record of rejections. So new people can try and try again until they find someone to give them a reputation bump. 3. For that matter, there seems to be no consideration of people's judgement skills in the current SqP algorithm. If someone has a history of including and rejecting the wrong folks, then their gatekeeping abilities ought to decline. 4. Garbage in, garbage out. Are people really going to put the time in to enter and maintain reputation designations? If they don't (and come on, they won't), then is the reputation algorithm going to produce anything that's useful? 5. What about retaliation? Avoiding #4 probably requires posting lots of reputation judgements. This is a recipe for in-group tension.
Finally, I wonder about the reputation system's algorithm. There is a big literature on this topic nowadays, but we appear to have rolled our own without making reference to why ours is better than all the existing ones. We have great people in the group, but it is rather arrogant to dismiss the world of CS research without at least explianing why we are doing something different.
Overall, I'm in favor of using some list like the one I posted earlier, and then working out a different system over time that is more traditional. I would happily revise this if the above concerns are addressed or if someone can point to a group or three that has tried using automatic reputation for membership and has found it effective.
To respond to 2 comments mentioned earlier:
First, Squeak People being mysterious is not just my idea, but Cees'. He has explicitly posted that he does not mean for the apprentice/journeyman/master designations to designate coding skill or level of contribution, and he ha snot said what it *does* designated nor why he thinks it shows it to us. It is as mysterious as it gets. We don't know what it says, and we don't know why we think it says what it says.
Second, I agree that people can hack a membership once they know the list of requirements. The list I posted was only intended for the *initial* membership list. We have to start somewhere, so I was wondering if there is some short list of objective criterian that would generate a reasonable looking list of initial members.
-Lex