This is not open source development. As a matter of fact, quite the contrary. Take a look at Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors.

FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer’s employer.

In my case, I’m offering folks attribution for their work that contributes to the common goal. I’m offering a venue. For example: I may have the requirements for a user interface but lack specific user experience/ interface design and development skill-sets. There may be someone out there who currently has great ideas and talent but lacks the opportunity to implement them. If that someone believed in the cause/project then they could contribute & have their name among the credits.

As far as communicating new concepts is concerned, I agree – it’s difficult. Especially if you try cranking out volumes of Word documents, or, wiki pages which are completely unconsumable. In our case, we’ve been successful following the outside-in agile/scrum software development methodologies where we break things down into small time-boxed deliverables. This enables us to quickly validate / flesh-out our theories without being married to documents that quickly become obsolete. I understand not all environments can be Agile.

The true challenge of building a tribe, in my opinion, is to find people who are pre-disposed to share in value and passion for your mission. Formulating the messages for communication of a truly new concepts is very difficult as a dictionary, tags, keywords are still quite amorphous and people are overloaded by information (?).