Just read through Nathan Marz's post about the history of Storm. This is really a nice recap of how to successfully start, grow and maintain a great open source project. Technical excellence is important, but the marketing, growing the community and adoption is even more critical.
Here is his post "History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned".
I am really looking forward to his new book on the lambda architecture: Big Data, principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems.
