It is sad that the Arduino team decided not to really discuss the developement of their hardware. The Arduino project is open-source in that you get to see the docs of how things are put together and make some suggestions, not actually have any input into how or what hardware gets created.
It's too bad that the A team rejected the somewhat utopian / anarchist model proposed by Daniel Jolliffe surrounding what gets called an arduino. In my estimation, having an open hardware model may have resulted in more standardized form factors earlier, and maybe fixed some of the clunky things, such as the infamous pin 7-8 gap before it got standardized. On the downside, more discussions and democracy does tend to slow things down, as David Mellis has pointed out.
So ironically, the most popular Arduino standard has an admitted flaw in it that at least a minority of Arduino users is really exercised about. Incidentally, this illustrates perfectly the dual nature of standards, benefitting users while also locking in deficits that will eventually make a new standard necessary.
Perhaps following the more or less secretive A team hardware model, the Freeduino community also seems to be working mainly in isolation, with a few exceptions - I have coordinated somewhat with at two other designers and builders and know of coordination between several others. But the standardization may take a long time. That being said there are wonderful additions to the Freeduino universe, (with not all using the Freeduino label - but that doesn't stop anyone from calling them Freeduinos - unlike the Arduino label) happening daily. 1000 flowers are really blooming.
It's so easy to create Freeduinos that anyone with even a bit of electronics knowledge and an interest in microcontrollers is almost guaranteed to succeed. This is probably going to hinder standardization for some time.
I would like to see some standards proposed in the playground with discussion pages following the proposed standards. I think price and manufacturing standards might also be discussed, opening up some of the not-too-hard-to-guess-at secrecy with which hardware is developed. Who knows, open source hardware might even result from the effort. One model would be to put up some public domain designs that anyone can manufacture and sell. This kind of openness may have been what Daniel Jolliffe had in mind when he proposed Freeduino as kind of unlimited brand open to anyone.
Incidentally, this was also one of my hopes in making the RBBB public domain, although I haven't really said that publicly anywhere. I'll be happy to put up the RBBB that way (especially if someone else builds the pages), having made the design public domain, I can't really control what people do with it anyway.