So it's clear the current group terminology is confusing people. People think they have to "join" a group to participate, when anyone can participate in a group. You only need to join if you want to help run a group.
So how do we differentiate between those who are active members of a community, and those who are on the party planning committee (i.e. those running the group)?
The top two roles are easy enough:
Admin
Editor
Editors manage the queue -- publishing and unpublishing diaries to the group. Admins are the same as editors, but do the hiring and firing (metaphorically speaking) and can edit the group description.
If it was just those two, the amount of confusion would be minimized. You either run the group, or you don't. But we have a third -- those people who can write diaries and post them to a group queue, but can't engage in site administrative duties. We currently call them "members".
"Member" isn't a good word because people rightfully point out that people feel like they belong to their communities, as if they have memberships. So they think to engage in a community they have to join it to get the requisite membership. And there's the corollary -- if you're not a "member" of a community, that lessens your participation. We don't want that.
So we thought, what about calling them contributors? At Daily Kos HQ, we call our content-producing people "contributing editors". Could that work? Eh. Not really. This suffers from the same problem we had with "member". Not only is everyone engaging in a community effort a "contributor", but sometimes, the best contributors are commenters.
So we're stuck.
1. What do you call someone who can post diaries in your group's name, but doesn't have administrative duties? It has to be a name that implies being in the group's leadership, without belittling the contributions of the rest of the community's membership.
2. What do you call it when someone becomes part of the site's leadership? It's not "joining" a group, as we have it now. It's something else. But what?