Hi,
That's why
I'm more and more reluctant to use the term "team".
I think it's fair. I personally have tried to avoid that term for a while, preferring "contributors", "committers" or even "community".
A team is supposed to be a pre-defined set of members, organized, unified towards common goals, obeying to some team lead who gives directions everyone has to trust and follow... It's not what community OSS is about; we kind of have the opposite with diverse people can participate or not on their own schedule, obeying different agendas, different goals and different priorities and not always capable of fitting into a wider organization; there is no unified leadership as no-one is contractually allowed to mandate someone else to do something; and so on.
I do believe this "disorganized" approach is actually more powerful than a team as it can reach differnet goals than what a team (usually with 1 common vision) can focus on, but it's indeed not really manageable, it's more "navigable" in the sense that the community is more an environment or an entropy -that one can try to influence, but not one can mate- than a set of manageable resources.
My 2c
