How do we plan to grow a community?

Jurgen Appelo doesn't like it when you call people "resources" on which I agree. But Vasco Duarte posts in a twitter message.

Projects are dead. Communities with shared vision/sense are what make work succeed. We need to build and grow communities

I agree on "growing" communities. But how are we going to solve the staffing issue? It's not like good developers,designers,architects,... are so easy to recruit and "gel" into teams that we can quickly add them.

We need some high level planning so we can see how much investment we need to get enough work done. Do we grow them ad hoc when the need arises? Isn't that to late to be competitive?

People who invest in companies want to see return on investment. To be honest I have invested money in a company and my only concern is when I invest X amount of money what Y% return do I get over which Z amount of time. When this company reports to me that's what I want to know.

Maybe my example is not valid because I didn't invest in a software development company. But I can imagine that most investors don't care about the sector but in the return yielded from their investment. They all want to know the bottom line.

This means we still need some form of planning and projection ahead. Vasco suggested to stop calling it projects so we can't call this planning and projection ahead activity project portfolio management. Any suggestions?