Well, in the community basically it is weighted towards early contributions (duh) but typically it is people who countribute well to the project in all levels.

Well, in the community basically it is weighted towards early contributions (duh) but typically it is people who countribute well to the project in all levels. The core committee has never had more than six people in it, and currently is down to three. There have been some political issues that have come up with some nominees unfortunately so I won't say the process works perfectly. However those who contribute well tend to get commit privileges and those who contribute to strategy beyond code have tended to become core members most of the time. Also regarding management and leadership.... Management is typically a command and control structure for the leaders. If you have a flat model, leadership becomes something different because you lack that command and control structure, and so does management. Someone gets to make sure the machetes are sharp. Maybe someone else is in charge of water.... But yeah good thoughts. BTW, I don't think flat orgs work everywhere. The companies that seem to be successful are those with a very narrow focus, like Github (building things around Git) and WL Gore, which builds things out of one, very specialized, form of plastic. Flat orgs scale up to any number of employees, but they don't scale up to large numbers of goals. I can't imagine how you'd have a flat org structure at Microsoft. Well I can, but it wouldn't be all that flat and it certainly wouldn't be a single org....