There's a new MacArthur Foundation/MIT Press book out called "Peer Participation and Software: What Mozilla Has to Teach Government" that I think many people here might find relevant & interesting. It describes Mozilla's processes, heavily focusing on the roles of volunteer developers and evangelists in the Mozilla community, and discussing whether these processes are transferable to government and civil society.

From the forward:

"The purpose of this report is to address how and why the Mozilla Foundation is successful at organizing large-scale participation in the development of its software. What motivates Mozilla to solicit the expertise of anyone who wishes to provide her time and knowledge to the Mozilla enterprise? What motivates volunteers to participate? .... Mozilla’s success at engendering part-time, volunteer participation that produces successful marketplace innovation suggests strategies for how to organize civic participation in communities and government. Specifically, the Mozilla approach might demonstrate how to galvanize participation by those in the technical community. More generally, Mozilla’s open source model may have something to teach us about how to create successful participatory democracy."

I haven't read it all yet (it's quite short, less than 100 pages) but it looks very interesting.

pdf here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Peer_Participation_and_Software.pdf

-- phoebe