Some great wisdom imparted by Shay Banon (creator of Elasticsearch). Be bored. To promote innovation. Open source and building a critical mass. Be committed. You need to care for it now; IRC, forums, negative feedback, bugs. The benevolent dicator model (BDM) versus the democracy with a leader model. Be distributed. Choose a useful (and normally hard) problem to solve. Best way to learn is to actually build something. Double down on passion.