RE: What Style Of Open Sourced Governance And Level Of Transparency Do We Want From Developers?
You may want to generalize further before zooming in. There are many forms of governance, organization, government (etc)
Each of the more popular topics comes with an insane amount of data and piles of books.
Initially when making Beavis and Buthead Mike Judge did everything on his own because [he argued] explaining a joke before making it doesn't work.
Having a single project dictator (or should we call him a god?) keeps the hierarchy easy to understand. There are countless advantages to having a single King who decides what goes and what doesn't.
If we assume our dictator to be a benevolent hero of the people (hah) the fatal flaw in the system comes after he leaves the project. At that point the replacement should have a sufficient amount of every positive quality he had (which could be many) The more diverse his skill set the harder it is to find his replacement. The new leader might also have new qualities previously delegated to other members of the project. We all suffer from an inflated sense of importance when it comes to our area of expertise. It is extremely hard to cast aside to make time to focus on the things one is bad at which is all to often not enjoyable either.
It seems to suggest (for dictatorship) the best choice to be a really bad lead developer who is aware of his flaws.
I wrote a bit of funny here about governance.