There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions? If you are just thinking about open sourcing a new project, what steps can you take to ensure a vibrant community? If you already have an open source project, how can you make your community more active? The community can make any project stronger, but they are not built automatically.(Via Linux Weekly News. Comments also pointed to a book on Producing Open Source Software (available free (cc-at-sa) from its website; reviewed here). I'll get back to that when I have time.)
The broad outlines of a possible open source project are starting to come together in my mind, somewhere in the vicinity of my CD-production tools, the website management tools, and the (still hypothetical) distributed blogging stuff. The encrypted off-site backup scheme may be separate; hard to tell at this point. More on that later.