The really good bits start after 25 minutes, when he shows the median number of contributor to ALL Free Software projects on GitHub, Sourceforge, Google Code, Savannah etc. is... 1. The median contributor more or less NEVER exceeds 3 developers.

This is an important lesson.

• Our Free Software project is just as successful or unsuccessful as everyone else in terms of available resources. We are not special, enjoy it or put on helmet. He does not say this, but from my experience once you dig your way past the sales managers and technical directors and project managers - the world of proprietary software IS THE SAME - the number of developers who can THINK and CODE is very, very small there too - perhaps a median of 5-7 because they are PAID to do it.
• A few - I think it is fair to say this from the evidence - brilliant and hard working people have an idea and then they encode that idea into code, which they maintain till they tire of it, and move on. Others then CAN step in and continue some SIMILAR effort, his example being how a GNOME SVG-library became Sodi Podi and then Inkscape. Sometimes the original developers abandon their own and continue with the new, sometimes they do not.
• People in Free Software do NOT generally collaborate, for various reasons, but if you want to change the above, then you might want to invest some time watching Mako Hill or read his paper - http://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf

Benjamin Mako Hill wrote:

I have suggested that Wikipedia succeeded because it sought to build a product that was familiar to potential contributors while adopting innovative processes and methods of organizing labor. This pattern, I suggest, is common to many of the most successful examples of peer production.

If he is right, then spreading Zot-enabled technology from the Friendica projects - Friendika/Friendica, RedMatrix and soon (?) Flute - is most likely to attract contributors by creating familiar things first, e.g a social network, and if so we are were we might expect to be.

interesting thoughts!