Thinking of the depressing (lack of, blocking of) discussion about governance on the numpy mailing list, I came across this email explaining why making XFree86 governance more open was a waste of time: http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-March/002286.html
One quote:
"You seem to have an obsession with governing, leading, the will of the community and democracy.
"Why are any of these critical to development success? They have nothing to do with what motivates open-source developers."
The email and the discussion around it were just before XFree86 died and X.org took over.
The Google+ URL for this post was https://plus.google.com/+MatthewBrett/posts/jMGpsi9xRAG