Shameless linkspam: Jason Hibbets pinged me on IRC today with a link that I immediately went "ooo, shiny!" on - opensource.com interviewing Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields about open source community leadership.
Some tidbits:
"I firmly believe that open source principles can help combat what I see as a growing problem: local apathy. Apathy comes from feeling you don't have a voice or a way of making change, while open source makes the opposite possible... two important and connected tenets of the open source way are (1) not letting the possibility of failure get in the way of doing something potentially great, and (2) recognizing when you've failed so you can learn from it and move on."
Paul calls out the Fedora QA, Translation, Docs, and Marketing teams, among others.
"...these teams all strive to grow participants into leaders. When we find a process that is not easy to understand for a new participant, we encourage that person to help us explore, document, and solve the problem. The whole team learns something in the process, the new member feels a sense of belonging with the team, and is empowered to drive further improvements. This process also effectively accelerates the new member's movement from novice to expert, and we actively encourage members to become teachers themselves. The members that naturally gravitate to more responsibility, involvement, and communication with other Fedora Project Teams effectively identify themselves as future leaders."
In general, (1) yay Paul! and (2) good stuff. The full article is on opensource.com at http://opensource.com/life/10/5/paul-frields-leadership-trust-fail-early-and-often, just in time for the release of Fedora 13.
(This has been your shameless linkspam of the day. Carry on.)