Crowdliness is about builing something that is truly worthy of a crowd ... it's about establishing the basis of a growing, shared, deep value.
Crowdliness is subject to human fraility ... certaintly not exactly next to godliness ... but it is about striving or attempting creating a community around some sort of thing that has legitimate shared value ... such that the community can grow and evolve to be much more than the original vision or original project scope ... the best examples of this are the most dynamic, growing and innovative crowds that you have ever been a part of ... little communities that grew into something almost indistinguishable from how they began, but were still crowds that were fun and meaningful for everyone involved.
If you have never experienced such a thing ... you need to get out more ... to grow your perspective by at least one hundredfold, think much bigger, think way beyond the artificial box that you have built to keep yourself safe.
This whole collection of repositories is really nothing more than a manual or manuals and building collection of curated lists for Developer Heros ... just a bunch of scribbling ... written by an aspiring Developer Hero, who is attempting to become more crowd savvy ... of course, the repo is completely forkable, you can fork/extend/write your own manual on becoming a Developer Hero
The Commitizen should be thought of as the Developer Hero's closest disciples, but the Developer Hero has to be more than just a guy who writes code, the Developer Hero really need to replicate a set of new Developer Heroes.
The Commitizen is that they put their thumbs on the table, risking getting their thumbs hammered ... they publicly COMMIT.
Not just Contributing but AWESOME Contributing and still more and more AWESOME Contributing.
Contributing is all about direct, intense, regular involvement.
Contributions come from solidly INVOLVED people who NEED to contribute in order to fulfill some sort of need that is directly tied to The Why of their lives
However, it is a matter of contributing to something that is only TIED TO The Why, it is not actually The Why of their lives currently or yet ... the Contributors are a larger group of people who might be investigating the effort and deciding whether they really want to be Commitizens or eventually Develop Heros.
Not necessarily crowdfunding or some sort of subscription model to sustain the effort, but maybe those ... maybe other ways of supporting at a distace.
Financial participation is SEPARATE FROM being a Commitizen or Contributing or the ways that involve direct, intense, regular, at least weekly, personal commitment ... but does involve requesting small amoounts of financial support.
Beware of the parasitic VCs, angel investors and other funders who want to get in on the ground floor of something in order to hijack or change its direction, but don't really share its goals or its ethos.
Remember, you will not need ANY money to attract GOOD crowds; you will need large sums of money to attract the SUCKERS and IDIOTS to SCALE the damned thing.
Do you want to? WHY???
Understand why scaling involves turning the thing the crowd built into a mere product ... it's important to see why productization can easily turns the corner toward damnation ... toward EVIL.
If scaling is done wrong ... and it's almost impossible to get right ... the product can stop being about the project vision that the Developer Hero and Commitizens wanted to build, and instead ALL becomes about Marketing, about drawing in the SUCKERS and IDIOTS who just FOLLOW crowds ... because they don't want to think; they just want to go where the cool kids are going.
Growing pains. Aggravation. 120-hr weeks. NEVER really leaving work behind.
Continual revolution and accelerating continual improvement is still really about building shareholder value and building the sustaining instutional culture of growth. The fun ain't over yet.
It's about ATTRACTING the RIGHT talent, RIGHT investors, RIGHT partners, even RIGHT customers to be involved ... and just saying NO to the wrong ones.
At this point, it's entirely about RELIABILITY, RELIABILTY, RELIABILITY.
It's really about maintaining shareholder value, paying dividends ... in light of changing technology or changing culture ... maintaining reliability for old customers and others who do not really want change or innovation, they just want to count on their old thing.
EVEN after we are just looking at the artifacts or fossils that remain ... even when we are looking at the ghosttown left over after the boom ... we are STILL thinking about the lessons learned, still thinking about looking forward ... rather than mourning the past.
What do you want to be the legacy of your efforts ... AFTER the fall, after everything is a fossilized ruin ... AFTER the crowd has moved on to bigger and better things.
Crowdliness is ALWAYS forward looking ... even we are celebrating what worked in the past. It's why we say, "The road goes on forever, but the party never ends."
An appendix ... a listing of what has really worked well.