Katz Got Your Tongue? » Incentivizing Innovation

One of the things I love the most about the Ruby community is how easy it is to try out small mutations in practices, which leads to very rapid evolution in best practices. Rather than having the community look toward authority to design, plan, and implement “best practices” (a la the JSR model), members of the Ruby community try different things, and have rapidly made refinements to the practices over time.
(Link: Katz Got Your Tongue? » Incentivizing Innovation)