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Let me share one important point (at least based on my experience):

From the beginning there shall be a definitive amount of energy spent on keeping the community friendly and encompassing, in mood and nature. This sounds trivial, I know. Small communities are often don’t even see why this is important.

As a community starts to grow some typical problems arise: senior members start to feel superior to newbies, they start to keep quality by reacting more and more harshly to the mistakes and inexperience of new members, the community may go in a direction where the “rules” are more important than talking about the problems and (preferably proactively) resolve them.

Keeping healthy mood requires some dedicated people to keep giving feedback to people diverging from the expected open attitude, to prevent escalating it to “moderation” and “bans”. Sometimes it requires lot more time expaining the problems and trying to find a resolution than to “block” the problem (administratively or technically). It worths noting that spelling out positive core values in the beginning helps remindig community members that they really shall spend energy on staying positive.

I do not want to cite bad examples, I am sure many people could think of some. For me OSM community is a good example, and I hope it stays that way. It needs work to keep it that way.

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