On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 8:11 PM, Danny Spitzberg <stationaery@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, my question: has there been any discussion around membership recruitment/ retention/ rebooting?​

Pardon the formalism creepiness...

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations

This is a list of religious populations by proportion and population. Estimates made by reliable sources differ. The CIA's World Factbook gives the population as 7,021,836,029 (July 2012 est.) and the distribution of religions as Christian 31.59% (of which Roman Catholic 18.85%, Protestant 8.15%, Orthodox 4.96%, Anglican 1.26%), Muslim 23.2%, Hindu 15.0%, Buddhist 7.1%, Sikh 0.35%, Jewish 0.2%, Bahá'í 0.11%, other religions 10.95%, non-religious 9.66%, atheists 2.01%. (2010 est.).

The difference between Christians (31%) and Jews (0.2%) is evangelism: it's part of Christian culture and against Jewish tradition. Evangelism, outreach, spreading the good word, marketing, enrolling, recruiting works faster than simple word-of-mouth or generational breeding (having big families with lots of little sudoers running around). Evangelism also compounds (exponential growth as newbies in turn evangelize).

This is just a social hack. We can do it. We can make the new Sudoer's journey easier to understand, our rites of passage crisper, and draft a communications plan to attract those who should become Sudoers. 

Do we have a sense of whom to recruit? Can we sketch our idea of those people well enough to find them?

Do we have confidence that our rites, rituals, and passages serve, among other purposes, as sufficient to effectively indoctrinate and socialize candidates into full sudoers?

Before we do much more than host a table at First Fridays, we might want to consider who we want to join our party and how we might do better at onboarding newbies.

- phil