Clay Shirky on OpenSource and Benevolent Dictators:
One of the big surprises about the Open Source movement is how many of the projects had a benevolent dictator for life at their head. There are a few that don’t, like the Apache Foundation. But Perl and Python and Ruby and Linux and on and on had the charismatic, technically adept founder at the head. How people find and identify those leaders, and what lessons we can take from the technical community to the nontechnical community, I think is a really big open question.