Number of speakers and participation

I think this conversation on targets for participation is really interesting. To re-hash some previous discussions on this topic, I'd point you to a graphic the Bridgespan team posted awhile back that engendered some controversy. [[1]]. We'd posted this graphic that shows what, to my mind, seemed like a really low rate of contribution from Wikipedia visitors - the ratio between visitors and contributors is less than .05% across all projects. What was controversial about this graphic was that folks didn't agree on the right target percentage - it is true, there is no way to know if .05% is fine, or if we should shoot for 1% or 10% for that matter. I think the second point on this graphic is really important, though, which is that for some projects there are very few total contributors. While I don't know how few are too few, it does make intuitive sense that you need some critical mass in order to protect a project from vandalism and build content.