Kent Beck, et. al.
“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support their needs, and trust them to get the job done.” (Beck et. al., “The Agile Manifesto,” 2001).
Eric Raymond
“If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.”(Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
Raymond states, “If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.” This works from both ends: working within transparent environments allows you to find interesting problems, while providing a transparent environment allows others to find your problems. (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
“Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.” (Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000)
James Surowiecki
The more important a decision is, the more likely those affected are to examine the facts themselves, rather than simply fall in line. (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
If you’re trying to harness the wisdom of crowds, you must attempt to have all decisions made at the same time, rather than one at a time. (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
Surowiecki points to the decentralization of the intelligence community, and the negatives involved in the difficulty of sharing information, cited as one factor in the failure of the intelligence community to predict and prevent the 9/11 attacks. The problem, however, was not decentralization, but decentralization with no way to aggregate the results into something useful. (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
“…in fact, the more a piece of information becomes available, the more valuable it potentially becomes, because of the wider array of possible users for it.” (Surowiecki, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” 2005)
Opening My Masters 