I still think there should be one maintainer with absolute control. Otherwise, "citizens" could take away someone's open source project with "democracy" or mob rule.
Imagine building something you are incredibly proud of to grow legs and walk away before you wanted it to.
"Absolute control" is gone the moment you make something open source. Even if Github doesn't make it easy, nothing stops anyone from forking your projects and convincing people to work on his fork instead other than social conventions.
that's not a problem with this proposal. All pull requests approved by the community end up in a non-master branch. The officially sanctioned version (master ) would remain untouched until the maintainer merged in the community changes.
People who equate open source (really peer production, but they don't understand the difference) with democracy always forget that in democracy the citizens have to pay taxes.
I don't think I'll ever stop being awestruck by the amount of fear the average hacker expresses when confronted by even the slightest democratic concept.
Imagine building something you are incredibly proud of to grow legs and walk away before you wanted it to.