A food forest is productive when all these layers are providing support to all the other layers.
Similarly that open source community will be productive when the core committee is serving the community by providing infrastructure and governance, the committers are writing code that benefits everyone else, etc. The goal is shared economic support and interdependence between the layers, and in this regard open source communities thrive when this works well.
So what does this mean about intellectual entertainment sites like Slashdot or Reddit, or to a lesser extent HN?
I guess the first thing you have to do is to have a group of people (Pg and others here) who decide what the goals of the site are (they are the canopy), but the next step is to ensure that there are different tiers with overlapping responsibilities to the community as a whole. HN for example seems to have officially a three tier system but unofficially a four tier system at least as far as I have seen. Maybe there are 5 or more tiers, if we count YC hopefuls, those who found firms funded by YC, etc.
I actually think this sort of stratification can be a good thing even though it cuts against modern notions of perfect democracy or egalitarianism. The fact that you have more strata here also means I find it is a more supportive community than a place like Slashdot with fewer strata.
