Following a post and interesting graphic about community participation in blogs, wiki’s and internet communities, which divided people in three groups: 1% creators, 10% synthesizers of other people’s material, and the rest being passive Consumers, there has been a lot of debate on the internet.

The gist is that such a view is too simplistic and ignores our mutliple roles. This certainly squares with my own experience: I’m quite actively creating and synthesizing P2P resources, but also passively consume hundreds of sources.

This topic has been best summarized by David Swedlow , whom we are quoting here:
“The gist of the confusion is that the 90% of the population who are Consumers are inherently consumers in all domains. We can test this assumption very quickly. If you are a creator in one domain (or community), does that mean that you are in the Creator category in all communities that you belong to? Do you belong to a community in which you are a Synthesizer (or Contributer)? And what about the Consumer role? Do you lurk in any of your communities that you derive benefit from?

The percentages indicate that if you are a member of 10 communities, the chances are good that you find yourself in the Synthesizer role in one of those communities. And if you find yourself deriving value from 100 communities, you are probably a Synthesizer in 10 of those, and a Creator in one of them.

There are two more categories of people that Bradley’s pyramid doesn’t cover. The first is the Decliners. This are the people who have been given the opportunity to participate in the community, but have declined to because of one reason or another. I’m going to assert that this group is also an order of magnitude larger than the immediately preceeding group (Consumers).

The next category are the Uninformed. These are the people who have not even heard of the community, so have neither rejected it, nor accepted it. Again, this group is likely an order of magnitude bigger than the Decliners (at least — possibly, this group is much larger).

The exciting part of all of this is that everyone is potentially a Consumer, a Synthesizer and a Creator. Even more interesting is the fact that if you belong to two communities, and you are a Consumer in both of those, but you use del.icio.us, or some other tool to bookmark your sites so that other people can see your bookmarks, the simple act of tagging two communities (or a piece of content in both communities) with a single tag is that a link between those communities has been created. In essence, you have become a Synthesizer!

Look at the way the dynamic spreads. Your second community has someone who is also a Consumer, but who doesn’t know about your first community. They follow your link, and voila, they move from Uninformed in relation to Group 1, to one of the other categories of user: Decliner, Consumer, Synthesizer or possibly even Creator!

And the more that people get involved meaningfully in more communities, the greater the crossover effect.”