Here are all the TIP:'s from the book:
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TIP: Use your mission as a slogan, on your website, marketing, presentations, and so on. If you are investing money in your community, you may want to trademark the mission statement.
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TIP: Change your mission as your community matures. At first, you will want to attract idealists and pioneers, then the leading edge, and then early adopters, the mass market, and finally, the late adopters. Each of these groups wants different things. Understand that, and tune your mission to suit.
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TIP: When proposing action, small or large, try always to start by identifying the problems you want to solve. Only when you have a clear and real problem on which everyone can agree, move to discussing solutions. A solution for an assumed problem is like a group without a clear mission.
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TIP: If the founders agree that “success” is defined as “having the most participants possible,” it can help in keeping your focus over the years. It also makes it easy to measure your success as you grow.
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TIP: Build a “seed” product in public view and encourage others to get involved from the start. If people do get involved, promote them rapidly. If they don’t, treat that as a sign your mission may be wrong. Use the seed product to build the community.
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TIP: If people are not joining in your seed, don’t continue working on it. Instead, discover what’s stopping them from joining and fix that. Start again from scratch if necessary. Don’t prematurely kill seeds; it can take time for people to appreciate what you are trying to do.
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TIP: When one person does something in a dark corner, that’s an experiment. When two or more people do something in a dark corner, that’s a conspiracy.
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TIP: One free contributor is worth 10 paid contributors.
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TIP: If every contributor owns their specific contributions, and you use a share-alike license, you don’t need copyright assignments or re-licensing from contributors.
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TIP: Write your rules very carefully, starting with choosing a license for content, and measure how much they help people. Change them over time as you need to.
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TIP: Promote the most active contributors into positions of authority, and do this rapidly. You have a short window for promoting new contributors before they disappear to other projects.
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TIP: If you are investing money in the community, then consider taking a US trademark so that you can stop people from making similarly-named imitations that don’t follow your processes. It costs about $750.
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TIP: Stay away from formal membership models, especially those that try to convert people to belonging to the group. Allow anonymous or unidentified participation. Encourage people to create their own competing projects as spaces to experiment and learn.
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TIP: To measure how tribal a group is, just start a competing project. If the response is negative and emotional, the group is tribal. A sane group will applaud its new competitors.
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TIP: Write rules to raise the quality of work and to explicitly allow anyone to work on anything they find interesting.
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TIP: Communities need power hierarchies. However, they should be fluid and heavily delegated. That is, choose the people you work with, and let them choose the people they work with. Power structures are like liquid cement; they harden and stop people from moving around as they need to. Any structure defends itself.
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TIP: When there is an interesting problem, try to get multiple teams competing to solve it. Competition is great fun and can produce better answers than monopolized problems. You can even explicitly create competitions with prizes for the best solutions.
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TIP: If your platform does not support it directly, find ways to tell contributors how well their projects are doing.
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TIP: When there is something that people are asking for, and you don’t know how to do it yourself, announce publicly that it is “impossible.” Or, propose a solution that is so awkward and hopeless that it annoys real experts into stepping up.
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TIP: Do you need meetings to get work done as a group? This is a sign that you have deeper problems in how you work together. You are excluding people who are not physically close by.
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TIP: Make it absolutely simple for logged-in users to create new projects. If projects are organized per user, you don’t need to worry about junk. If they’re in a shared space, you may need tools to purge junk and abandoned projects.
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TIP: Design your community as a searchable city of projects, where anyone can start a new project, projects represent perhaps a dozen people’s work, and all have familiar structure, as much as possible.
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TIP: Use classic training tools – presentations, videos, answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), tutorials – to get people started. It helps if you are part of the community so you can see what kinds of questions people ask when they start.
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TIP: The more serious your message, the more you need humor. In my ZeroMQ book, I wrote a lot of silly nonsense mixed with the heavy technical explanations. Most people enjoyed and appreciated this.
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TIP: Perfection precludes participation. Releasing buggy, half-finished work is an excellent way to provoke people into contributing. Though it can be hard for big egos to accept, flaws are usually more attractive to contributors than perfection, which attracts users.
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TIP: Every time you find it necessary to spend money on the community, ask if you could have found a way to get others to help instead.