Open-source Governance
Open-source governance borrows ideas from the open source movement and is seen in online communities like Wikipedia and Linux. Open-source governance yields models that efficiently engage the general citizenry in decision-making processes. This is sometimes called emergent democracy and is largely differentiated by allowing individuals to engage as much or as little as they wish. These systems are exemplary at empowering a large quantity of medium-quality free labor in projects that have a pre-existing community and produce some sort of social good.
Open-source governance degrades the moment top contributors’ influence significantly shapes policy. Why? Usually, top contributors are those with the most time on their hands. Having a lot of time on one’s hands correlates highly with low levels of responsibility on most fronts (e.g., having a job, caring for others, doing basic maintenance such as cleaning, shopping, taxes, etc.) and low responsibility correlates with low competence. There’s a reason behind the stereotype of the unhygienic “neck beard” moderator within tech communities: Those who have been rejected from other groups have both more motivation and time to engage with open-source power politics.
Governance models that grant maximum power to participants with minimal “real-world” competence typically don’t take organizations very far (consider rapidly-growing reddit communities that succumb to the caprices of a tyrannical moderator). This may explain why the most successful organizations and communities that govern in an open-source model, such as Wikipedia, aren’t led, on a macro level, by top contributors.