Thomas Kriese said:

Harry, the 200 "active" people you identify feels about right, and perfectly normal given the 90-9-1 ratio of phenomenon of participation inequality (see article by Jakob Nielsen).

So I'm not as concerned as you are about only 200 people being really committed/active on the site.

From the beginning (and many times over) I've stated that we use omidyar.net internally to support our work, and we extended the tool out to others externally to support them finding shared interests and making good things happen. I haven't stated "it's only for these kinds of activities" anywhere (and if I have, I'm sure someone will link to it).

omidyar.net is open for people to use it as they see fit, as long as they agree to the ground rules. Some folks are better at minding the ground rules than others, but it's ultimately up to the community itself to decide how it's going to work things out. This is really a self-managed community, and we are all able to see both the strengths and the weaknesses of taking this self-managed approach.

Yes, we (the omidyar.net dev team) have a hand in incrementally changing features here and there. We've even tried to enlist the self-managed community in helping distribute over $500,000 to organizations that the community has selected. But the content we see here in the comments and discussions and workspaces is that of the members of the community.

As you and others have no doubt noticed, there's plenty of room for people to talk about whatever they like, to share views that are both popular and not and to act in ways that on the one hand might be seen as not helpful, but on the other hand actually quite are.

One other thing: The link that Dafna made above (http://www.omidyar.net/portfolio.php) are the investments that have been made by staff using the workspaces as a way to negotiate the due diligence process. This was our internal use of the tool, not the community's work to make decisions. The community-directed investments that I spoke of two paragraphs above are here: http://www.omidyar.net/group/on/ ws/community_favorites/

(edited to fix typos)

This info seems and feels contrary to the many prior discussions of participation on the o/net. Before claims were made and graphs supplied to justify.......whatever alleged higher participation. ;^)