I became interested in this recently and decided to experiment with it over at PressRise.com (a reddit alternative). We just coded our first user-submitted feature today (text-only submissions).<p>If you're unfamiliar, community-driven development is giving control of a development process, its resources, and decision-making authority directly to community groups.<p>In the context of software development, this pretty much means giving your dev team to a product's users and letting them decide what work they do on the product.<p>Having this kind of community-driven process in place could theoretically allow a piece of software to "evolve", with the conditions of its survival through each iteration being <i>directly</i> tied to the wants and needs of its users (rather than indirectly, as is the case with every other piece of software).<p>I think this might also have the effect of making the users feel like they have more ownership over the platform itself, which could drive brand loyalty and long-term user retention. Is that only the case for social apps though, or could other kinds of software benefit from this? Would anyone really care if they felt "ownership" over some B2B SaaS product?
Assembly[0][1] is a great example of this I think. They have a number of community driven products in all stages of development. I think rather than just feeling like they have ownership the contributors do get some actual real form of ownership in the product. I am actually unsure of how that works though.<p>[0] <a href="https://assembly.com" rel="nofollow">https://assembly.com</a><p>[1] <a href="https://assembly.com/discover" rel="nofollow">https://assembly.com/discover</a>