Gittip, Logos & Gamification, Oh My!

I've been worried about Drupal participation lately. Partly because we should be at the peak of D7 participation right now and there are still so many modules that are lagging in an unfinished state. I don't remember this being the case with D6 contrib modules prior to the release of D7, but I have no facts to back that up.

Most of the posts are in here - https://drupal.org/project/drupalorg

Which may not be the right place to put them, but when I've got working examples, it's more concrete than just a discussion.

Gittip inclusion https://drupal.org/node/2138397 - Postponed
Logos in issue queues https://drupal.org/node/2177459 - Closed (won't fix)

I've worked to address all of the concerns, but obviously this is a big change.

I think that there is a real problem waiting with what we have now until we have a perfect solution. I do believe that too often perfect is the enemy of good. We have to be able to experiment & iterate with this community to find ways to enhance experience.

Anyways, there have been previous discussions about badges, points and other means to boost participation.

I like the approaches to welcome anonymous visitors or new users, much like the WWSGD module is attempting - https://drupal.org/project/wwsgd

We have to remember that we will never be able to please all 1 million users in this community.

Iterations should be done incrementally and I know it will be slow. But we really can't have user suggestions sitting in a queue for over a year. I hit quite a few outstanding issues that I'm hoping to bring into the new D7 site (and yes, I do appreciate how huge an initiative the upgrade was).

So, there's lots of long discussions in both threads and hopefully there will be more here.

There are lots of incentives for participation in the Drupal community. Let's name them, and find ways to enhance them. I do really think that the model provided by Stack Exchange is worth experimenting with. They do a great job of thanking folks for their contributions and providing little automated rewards to make users feel good.

Shouldn't we be working toward that type of community?