(I'm intrigued by your addition of an exclamation point!)

I guess that as you wrote it in all caps, that's how I read it, even if it wasn't there.

but it's as vibrant as it's ever been,

Hm. That's not the picture I see.

 Author: Carl Masak <cmasak@gmail.com>
  Date:   2012-01-16 (Mon, 16 Jan 2012)
 
  Changed paths:
    M S02-bits.pod
 
  Log Message:
  -----------
  [S02] fix tiny typo
[download]

At one time my inbox was filled with those. Now it is just a sporadic trickle that comes in fits and starts.

At its peek, it was ... I cannot describe it better than masak already did:

Pugs: The golden age

I remember stumbling into the #perl6 channel on freenode, still fairly dazed by the fact that someone was taking the Synopses and implementing them. Add to this that Audrey Tang turned out to be a frighteningly productive hacker with a magnetic personality which drew other people into the project like nothing I or many others had ever seen. Being on the #perl6 channel was like standing close to the eye of a hurricane; things just magically happened, either because Audrey had just landed another set of commits, or because someone had started a cool side project and was hacking on that, all the while bringing interesting ideas and thoughts into the channel.

For all the very genuine reasons for various key individuals need to take time-outs or withdraw, there is an underlying problem that is best summed up by paraphrasing a speech given to me by one of my old bosses when he came in and found I'd pulled another all-nighter:

I appreciate the productivity you achieve with your solitary way of working, but, the moment you appear to becoming indispensable to me, I will sack you.

Just be sure to document where you are going and why; and to delegate each step as soon as you know where it is headed. That way, if you are hit by a bus, I'll be able to carry on moving forward, even if things slow to a crawl.

Historically, I was lousy at letting go of my babies, but I learnt to delegate. I brought in a technical writer and made him project leader. He could take my scribbled, near incomprehensible ramblings, and with a few well targeted questions and some insistence, turn them into time-lines, milestones, action lists and progress reports. He ran the project better than I ever could, despite that he had little in the way of technical know-how or experience. But the key to his success was his insistence from about the 3rd week that I give him the authority to not just question me, but tell me I was wrong. I ceded that authority reluctantly, and benefited from having done so every day from that point forth.

Not just on that project with that particular TW, but on every subsequent project because of what I learnt from it. There has to be someone, divorced from the oohs and ahhhs of the bleeding edge, with the authority to pull the threads of a project in a consistent direction. That's what I see missing from so many OSS projects.