Core group

An OVN can be seen as a flow-through organization. The statistics of contributions to ventures and projects is long tail, meaning that at any given moment in time there is a small group of heavy contributors, called the core group and a large group of sporadic contributors (the long tail).

Contributors can migrate towards the core by contributing more frequently, and can freely go in and out of participation (see more on openness). Ventures are nested OVNs, they exhibit the same participation dynamics. This participation dynamics is characteristic to all open processes, open source projects, Wikipedia, cryptocurrency mining, etc. This stands in contrast with traditional closed organizations that operate in a regime of scarcity with a predefined number of participants and a contribution statistic that resembles more a bell curve (most people contribute what is expected from them, few contribute less than expected and few contribute more).

Usually, the core group of a venture is the driving force, projecting vision and ensuring its continuity. Peer production processes become statistically stable, predictable, if there is enough redundancy in terms of distribution of skills over Processes (more people that can provide the same skills in the long tail, increasing the probability that someone will do a task in effective time).