I've been asking myself the following 2 questions for about 5 years now: am I good at managing an open source project and making it successful? How can I improve?

I guess it depends on the definiton of "successful". My definition of a successful OSS project is:

1. A project that has a big user community and mindshare
2. A project that has a big development community (i.e. committers and contributors). That is the development mailing list should be quite active with lots of contributions, improvements, ideas being discussed. All those submitted by a large number of different persons
3. A project that lives on if the initial or main contributor leaves the project

If we go by point 1, I think that the main 2 projects I have started (Cactus and Cargo) are not doing too bad. Cargo is still new but it seems to be on track and its user base is growing very quickly.

However on points 2 and 3, I'm not so sure I'm doing well. Mind you, Cargo has quite a lot of committers (growing every week!) and they're all doing a great job. I'm just thinking about the level beyond (look at the activity on the Maven project, Spring or other projects as an example of what I mean). Cactus is a bit different as it's now a mature project, so let's focus on Cargo. Of course it could be that these project domains are narrow and thus do not interest lots of developers. This is probably true but I don't think this is the only issue. I have the feeling that some of the reasons could be:

• Unconsciously I may be "driving" the project too much. For example if someone proposes something, I'm probably going to argue with this person in order that it fits Cargo's quality crtieria and direction. It's possible that by doing this, I'm cutting some creativity from this person and thus even if he implements the thing, maybe he'll feel it has not completely come from him and won't identify with it enough to maintain and improve it in the future. Or maybe by arguing I'm just making the life of that person harder and as this person is doing this in the little free time he has, he may not pursue it...
• Maybe I'm answering emails asked on the list too fast, thus preventing any other contributor to answer. This is setting the tone and maybe as a consequence people are expecting me to answer all emails. Everyone "knows" that I'll answer them anyway...
• The same could be said for applying patches and implementing things. I think this is less true though as I also have a day job and there are lots of JIRA issues accumulating in the Cargo project for example, so there's room for takers
• Documentation of Cargo seems good at first glance (although I know there are lots of holes). I wonder if, as a consequence Cargo users who look at the web site think that Cargo is stable, mature, etc and thus may feel less inclined to participate. Who wants to participate to a project that is mostly "done"! (Note: For those reading this and interested in Cargo, it is far from true and there are tons of things to design and implement!)

On the other hand, I feel that not doing any one of these points will hamper Cargo's user adoption...

Or maybe I'm completely wrong on all points above and this is just me fantasizing!

I'm really interested to know what you think and if this is something other OSS committers/contributors have noticed too. I've given the example of Cargo but really this is a general discussion on how to best manage an OSS project.