Both FB or WP require registration to make edits. The main pages are often locked. I have seen similar implementations elsewhere.

You do parse well! You have replied with some of what I included in a draft, but edited or softened! Two points in particular: Elgg would be best served by the core devs relinquishing some control of some aspects of this project. Secondly, Curverider’s priorities and those of the the community are not identical. It would be best to harness this.

As one who has written a few simple plugins, I agree with your final point. In the spirit of open source, I’d rather the community feel ownership of the plugin.

However, I agree with the criticism about the Elgg developers not relinquishing enough control. The documentation would probably vastly improve if anyone, or at least registered users, could make edits. Maybe the developers are worried about having to constantly monitor the wiki for accuracy, but most wikis are self policing, i.e. people who care about the individual pages check them regularly. It’s possible that the Elgg community is not large enough yet for this to work properly, but I think it’s worth the experiment.

On the same theme, I think the pace of development would be greatly increased if there were a better mechanism to submit patches to the core, rather than having the Curverider folks take sole responsibility for them. People will work on the bugs and features that they care about and the communities priorities might not completely match Curverider’s priorities. Not having this defeats much of the purpose of Open Source. Similar functionality is needed for plugins. I may not care to revisit a plugin that I wrote if it works on my site, but I certainly want others to be able to improve it without having to fork the code.

I’m still wondering why some plugins that were available in the google group weren’t left there or released at the .org site.
It does seem that dave & co are very reluctant to give up any stewardship to others and I find it hard to imagine how, as the project gathers followers again, the new structure will cope. Where will all the trivial enquiries go. Inmy head I see a big road sign with arrows on it showing very clear directions for people with specific areas to move to.
Are the new areas to which people will be inclined to go responsive enough. Because you know what it’s like, people will want a response.
I hope plugin developers don’t get too much flack because they’ll then discourage feedback.
Perhaps I’m overthinking it here, I’m happy to sit and see how it goes anyway.

Phil