On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 08:36:46PM -0500, John Leslie wrote: > Somebody help me, please: If the time of active contributors is a > precious resource, isn't the obvious solution to encourage more folks > to _become_ active contributors? Only the competent ones. There's a reason why all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley spend a huge amount of effort making sure that you don't hire people who will drag down the rest of the team. So if there is a way of encouraging the compentent to be active contributors, and discourage the incompetent, the open source project and standards body is more likely to thrive. The fact that someone has the funding to attend a face to face meeting, whether it be to an open source conference, or a standards meeting, certainly does not correlate perfectly with competence, granted. But my personal experience is that it works surprisingly well, so the fact that face to face meetings might make it harder for those who can't find someone who thinks it worthwhile to fund their work and/or travel, is not something that I personally have a problem with. Of course, I'm not on the IETF leadership, so fortunately, it's not up to me. :-) Cheers, - Ted