I think it could be interesting to categorize types of popular web sites. Then a list of user types could be compiled for each category. Next explore how the roles evolve from a curious visitor to contributing stakeholder. Then this document could be utilized to create a formula (or business plan) for creating a new and successful web site.

In my experience, Open Source Software is develop by people that belongs to these new roles. Even sometimes these people do not have a proper education to be a good developer and, basically, do what is best on their possibilities and, at the end, succeed on this task. Therefore, If somebody can develop a framework where we not only characterize these new roles but also identify these people and enrolled them in some type of Software Engineering Course we will have a large and reliable source of new Software Engineers.

By allowing the end user to participate in the input in development, it brings people with many different backgrounds to a project and allows for much better testing. There are essentially infinite number of testers and debuggers so it helps perfect the product. Obviously this cannot work for all products since some are confidential by nature.

I have not done any previous research in this area. By looking at some open source projects we can see how it works, and figure study them.

I like this project's goal to create a framework for characterizing the different roles of the people that are involved in software development. I think this is particularly interesting because of new devises such as the Iphone and Playstation 3. These technologies are acting as a transition technology, bridging the gap between developer and user-created content. As others have said before me there is also the issue of open source software and the "copy-left" philosophy as both have completely changed how software is created and who has access to the content. Having software that is open to anyone for modification allows several people of various backgrounds to create a much more diverse and perfected program, but what do we call these hybrid developers? How do we categorize their contribution, etc? These questions would be interesting to try to answer.