Contributor - I can see where this was going, but there are currently no users added to this group. Until we can come up with a better system for it, I’d say we delete this group.
Development Observer - Now this one I’m quite clueless about. Since there are a couple members for it I suppose it had a purpose once, but now every member except Momoko_Fan (why is he here?) has not been on the forum active for years, and many have hardly ever participated at all, but I guess the ‘observer’ part might partially explain that.
I plan to seperate between two types of groupings: Forum membegroups, and project membergroups, initially being:
Forum:
- Normal member
- Moderator
- Global moderator
- Administrator
Project:
- Developer
- Manager
- Champion (equivalent of 'Friend' on Simple Machines forums, so past 'majors' like darkfrog, renanse and mojomonk would not go unnoticed, and might also have read&write access to private forums still)
Certainly Trussel. I do also remember there being a longer list of developers back in the day though. Reading some old post about this guy called "Dark Prophet" (I believe) who was leaving the community after having accumulated ~1500 posts I thought there might be a whole lot of "champions" out there who even left before my time here started.
Still no explanation for 'development observer' though. Do I just delete it?
I know the committers are all listed in google code, but I can't easily match their name there with their nick here, so please help…
Champions would clearly include Josh Slack, Rikard Herlitz, and Mark Powell (if he's not taking an active hand in jME anymore… I'm unsure of this).
The people listed as “Project members” are contributors e.g. they have write access to the svn repository.
I think it makes sense to distinguish between contributors and developers.
Contributors are people who provide and commit patches and smaller improvements (like me hinthint*, mulova and a few others).
Developers would be momoko_fan, blaine etc. people who add substantial elements to the code base.
If someone posts a patch in the contribution depot it would be good to know if he is a contributor or just a member without access to the repo.
makes sense 
I changed the naming convention to committer though, as it’s a more clearly defined term than “contributor”, and it also didn’t take up as much space in the tag ;D
Would be very nice if you and others capable could help me sort out the users entitled to a ‘committer’ or ‘champion’ tag.
I would not oppose deleting it.
Development Observer is a member of the "ARB" (architecture review board) of jME. When renanse was still working on jME, this was a group of experienced developers who were using jME, either commercially (like NASA, Sun project wonderland, bang howdy) or non-commercially (like me, some other people). At this point the group is inactive, no posts have been made on the ARB board for a long time, so you can remove it.