Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Highlight

Mikeal Rogers, who worked on Node.js in the early days, describes this model in his blog post “Healthy Open Source”: The purpose of [Node.js’s contribution] policy is to gain contributors, to retain them as much as possible, and to use a much larger and growing contributor base to manage the corresponding influx of contributions. . . . Avoid creating big decision hierarchies. Instead, invest in a broad, growing and empowered contributorship that can make progress without intervention.