I had a really good time at Reboot 9.0 this year, never been before, but it was top drawer. My favourite discoveries were the brilliant David Smith and Tina Aspiala. Also good to catch up with old friends at the shiny and new Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. So in the spirit of the people, I sat in the talks, looking through the faces oscillating between laptop and speaker, and drew them. Some drawings went into Webb’s talk, my favourites are below, and the rest are in a Flickr set.

I liked this guy’s glasses a lot.

Smart suit.

This guy kept fidgeting and glancing between laptop and presenter.

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action

Neilsen points to less equitable distributions, and gives suggestions on how to increase the number of participants. Previously the Guardian have discussed this as the 1% rule.

It throws up a ton of questions. Is the growth of a social software system led by the number of participants, or the number of lurkers you can gather who somehow turn into participants? What are the distributions for different sites, and with what are these correlated? Are people who participate in one community more like to participate in another? Does having a consistent identity across services promote or damp general participation? With which distributions are the people lurking and participating most satisfied? How does this compare to television, newspapers, the postal service, the music industry and so on?

I don’t like the word “inequality” because it’s so loaded – the whole phrase seems to promote deliberate and vocal participation as a good thing – but I’d love to know more about distributions of different modes of engagement with communities, completely online and otherwise. Any suggestions for reading material?