The goal of a community of developers is hard to create and difficult to maintain it in a sustainable way. We know together where we come from and how the developer community of SME Server was. The question is : why they (you) left away…but there are certainly several billions of answers, each guy gets his reasons.
With the reasons which lead you to the exit, probably we could have some things to not reproduce here, if you want to have a community of developers. I love History mainly because it can help you to not do again mistakes.
The first things I don’t want to see could be developer caste, the core and the nethforge. I don’t know too much about the owncloud community, but their agreement makes me think a bit like that. I need to make research and to forge my opinion about this way.
IMHO this project needs a real wiki, discourse can’t compete with redmine/dokuwiki/wikimedia, and it will be a start to share informations like I do for SME Server.
The junior job is encouraging , the developer skill grows issues after issues therefore it is important to encourage people to start on low level features/bugs instead to go to the wall because they think that it is cool. That’s a good idea.
The bountysource could interest me, I develop for fun, but each month I pay for my server at 1&1, 40 real €…I recall the snobble club where rpms were available against subscriptions and it is maybe a way to encourage. In other hand that could come from the core and be integrated in a market where you return back the payment to the developer.
But also I would listen others 