Mitchell Baker's got a great post up talking about Mozilla Community and Mozpad.
She's absolutely right that things get done when people come together and start "doing".
I tried to get involved with Mozilla the day the source code was released, way back in early 1998. Unfortunately for me, Mozilla didn't really have any opportunity for non-developers. They hadn't anticipated that open source would attract more than just coders and so they were simply unprepared for someone like me.
There were plenty of coder resources, at least as far as I could tell. There was CVS repository for the code and the website. There were docs on how to use those tools to pull and compile Mozilla. There were lists of who was coding on what and where a coder might get review. The entire operation was set up to attract open source developers but almost nothing had been done to accommodate other kinds of volunteers.
(You couldn't even test Mozilla unless you could compile the sourcecode.)
I really wanted to be a part of Mozilla and I didn't give up. I chased after semi-random ftp sites that contained the occasional compiled binary, I posted to newsgroups, I congregated with others at mozBin and mozillaZine (that was before their big merger) and eventually we got the beginnings of an open source testing community going.
As we started to demonstrate real value to the project, Mozilla staff and Netscape took notice and began to make infrastructure changes that supported our efforts, including the production of daily compiled binaries and some early testing documentation dumps to www.mozilla.org. The nascent testing community took that and ran with it, creating even more value and the whole thing spiraled up to about 10,000 people downloading and testing daily builds, reporting tens of thousands of bugs, creating a whole mess of testcases, producing documentation, and spreading the word.
Mozilla's open source quality assurance and testing program didn't just materialize out of thin air and it didn't happen because Mozilla or Netscape said "let there be an open source QA community." It happened because a few very determined volunteers, in the face of some pretty serious barriers, decided that the best way to make it happen was to start "doing".
Henry Thoreau: "Success often come to those that are to busy to be looking for it".
One of my favorites, I hope I didn't misquote it.