Maybe comparing some political models for open-source communities might be helpful.
Such as
- Do-ocracy (e.g. explained here: https://communitywiki.org/wiki/DoOcracy)
- (Benevolent) Dictatorship
- Timocracy
- Meritocracy
- Democracy
The main trade-off maybe being: speeding up any process until an outcome vs. improving how well the outcome covers the needs of different (sub-)communities.