It depends. If this is starting a chain of thought like 'Where can I get people to work with me, too', you should really consider where you need more people right now, tho.
Small teams, ideally one person, are easier to manage. The more people you have, the more communication you need to keep everyone productive. The larger the group, the more morale will play a part in getting work done. Apathy will set in with a large project that is being managed poorly. Trust me on this. I've seen it on my own project, and others... (SotS, Revelations, Fantasy Realms... Years in the making, and dubious amounts of work done on each in the public's eye ;).
You must be careful when dealing with groups of people, especially when all of the work they do is pro bono (for free). Everyone has their own lives, and is working on the project as a hobby. Not much time a week can be devoted to this, unless they're a high school student(VERGE's traditional user base, and sadly not me anymore...), or a hermit(like sharkey ;). Making a game takes a significant amount of man-hours, and progress will most likly be slow.
Another fatal error in VERGE-team management is lack of morale in the team. This is your biggest killer, actually. If your team members aren't excited about the project, it'll die a slow death. This is remedied by keeping everyone involved in the design process. If you have programmers and artists and musicians, let them all see each other's work on a regular basis! Continually update your game, and keep them pumped. Once you lose steam, inertia will make it hard as hell to get rolling again! It's possible to do, but it's much easier, and *much* more productive to never let it slip in the first place.
Finally, only ask people to join that you really need. Initially you'll think that getting more people on board will make it go inherantly faster, and you'll need to do less work. This is wholly untrue. If everyone starts doing less because there are more people, then the point of bringing more people in is defeated. Small teams tend to work more efficiently, because there's less obfuscation in the communication lines.
The *real* reason to ever bring a new person on board is to cover a skill set you don't currently possess. If you suck at art, get an artist. If you can't code worth shit, get a coder. However, don't immediatly say "wah, I need an artist/coder/musician, because I cannot draw/code/rock!" Freakin' *try* to draw tiles or learn vergeC before crying. Nobody will want to help you if you haven't released anything yet. At least, nobody sane or useful.
So, in summary:
1) keep your team as small as possible, to maximize efficiency and managability.
2) talk to them regularly (email each other compulsivly, using a client program like eudora instead of hotmail, so it stays open and checks mail every 5 minutes or so, and tells you when something new's up. This will distract you less than IRC, which destroys productivity.)
3) Do work and show everyone! This keeps people motivated! Nothing gets people to want to work more than visible progress!
4) Don't be a whiney bitch. No 'project leader' will really get anywhere bossing everyone around and doing shit. That works in the Real World, because full-time managers are good things for getting teams to work. Unfortunatly, this is a largly free/shareware community, so nobody gets money. This means, unless you have all incredibly intelligent, rational, and subservient team members (hint: you don't), They are going to want you to carry your weight. And rightly so. You need to be shouldering development work *on top of* keeping everyone together and moving forward.
It's daunting. And frankly, so far it hasn't produced anything yet tangible in the community. Face it: Zara works largly alone, and he's the only one in 4 years to finish a full-length game.
A few more hints. Spend more time working on your game than talking about it to 'the public'. Talk about it a lot with your team, and shut up to 'the community'. Yeah, it's fun to boast and brag, but that gets you nowhere. Sure, release a game or two, put up a small website, but don't devote massive amounts of time to a fancy-pants super-mega-flash-enabled website-o-rama. All smoke and mirrors a good game not make. If there's a big, pretty website for a game that's 'coming soon', realize that there's no actual proof of work on the game, and only proof of work on the site. Not a good sign.
It's better to be ugly and have a game nearly done, than to have a prtty page proclaiming how wonderful your vaporware will be.
Ahem.
All that said... Anyone here a good manga-style artist who is willing to draw about 400 sketches for me to convert to colored sprites, and miscellanious speech portraits? ;D
-Grue
Sometimes, Ocham's Razor needs to be more like a scimitar...
