liked the blog post. I’ve also heard this referred to as “the 1% rule” as if there is some underlying force of nature or physics that makes it immutable. In my experience (350 communities of practice active across local government – http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk) the contribution rate is related to the type of CoP. Learning or knowledge stewarding CoPs seem to have a fairly long life cycle and fit the 90-9-1 ‘rule’. CoPs devoted to innovation (e.g. policy development) have shorter life spans and more intense activity. Some of these have a 40% contribution rate (i.e. power contributors), primarily because the community itself has committed to delivering something within a defined time scale. So, I think we also need to factor in the type of community when anticipating the contribution rate.

Interestingly, if I measure the contribution rate across the whole platform (350 CoPs), it does seem to average out at 90-9-1. Not sure what to read into this yet, but I do know that the overall stats are being dragged down by a relatively small number of CoPs that have little or no activity. If I eliminate these from the aggregate, I get something like 60-30-10 – which I reckon is pretty good.