Jon Husband at Wirearchy quotes an article from Emergence that describes the role of senior management in companies that have taken a "cellular technique" approach to organizing themselves

The role of traditional senior management grows less important in these models - less concerned with establishing a direction for the company, and more involved with encouraging the clusters that generate the best ideas

He then goes on to describe this new style of management as champion and channel, and associates it with working open source. I'm not sure that this is really an accurate description of how things work in many open source projects. Championing is kind of like marketing, but most open source projects don't market (at least not beyond a freshmeat entry or sourceforge page). There is "championing" that goes on at the level of developers saying to each other that such and such project is cool, but that's not a management function, because there isn't any management. Similarly, there aren't really any resources to channel other than people's time, and you can't really channel that either. People have to want to give it. You can try to persuade them to give their time, but the word channel implies more influence than you actually have.

I still like Stefano's description of working/leadership in open source: "Getting people to do something when you have absolutely no power to get them to do it". Is there an analog of "champion and channel" that fits open source projects? I think there may be, but I need to think about it some more...