2009/7/2 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
As the projects have grown and as they have become more centrally managed in a top down fashion it has become increasingly difficult for ideas to percolate from the bottom up.
In my experience, the opposite has happened. As the projects have grown the community has taken a larger and larger role in running them (the top hasn't grown fast enough to continue running them effectively if it wanted to). A good example of that is Jimmy's involvement on the English Wikipedia, it has been reducing steadily since he founded the project.