LinkedIn Open Networker
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LinkedIn networking philosophy is based on a simple rule that says that a person should invite to connect only persons that they personally know (for instance, school colleagues, coworkers, business partners, service providers etc.
However, this limitation is viewed by some members of the LinkedIn community as overly restrictive. So some of them have adopted a policy of accepting invitations even from strangers. They circumvent some LinkedIn requirements (e.g. having to know a person's email address in order to send a linking invitation to them) by publicly posting their email addresses in their profiles, and stating that they openly accept invitations, thus becoming LinkedIn Open Networkers, or simply LIONs.
The most important LION's rule is that in no circumstance an invitation is to be replied by clicking the "I don't know X" (X being the name of the person that sent the invitation) or even worse, mark it as spam. In case a LION doesn't want to connect with a specific person, all that he needs to do is to archive the invitation, which thus is set to automatically expire. (Choosing "I don't know X" or marking an invitation as spam can cause LinkedIn to impose restrictions on the account of the inviting party).
It must be noted though that not everybody that displays an email address on their profile is automatically a LION. Usually, the LION word is also present on the profile. LIONs can nuance the above rule of conduct when it comes to the received invitations, for instance, there are LIONs that won't accept standard invitations and require people to write customized invitations (for instance explaining why they would like to connect).
[edit] LinkedIn position on LIONs
LinkedIn, while not having explicitly prohibited LIONs, has adopted a rather negative position against LIONs. Thus, when LinkedIn first started, there were no limits on the number of invitations one could send, where currently each person that joins LinkedIn now starts with a fixed number of invitations.
Also, at LinkedIn's beginnings, the number of connections one had was visible in full. Currently, when a person gathers more than 500 connections, only "500+" is displayed instead of the actual number the connections. Moreover, this number is visible for the account owner only in the Connections section.
For quite a while, LIONs were organized outside of LinkedIn. When LinkedIn started the Groups program, finally there was a LION group organized on LinkedIn.
