When I'm not trying to teach my friends and family why Socialism isn't really a bad thing, I spend a lot of time advocating free and open source software (FOSS), with a particular focus on the Linux kernel and the KDE Software Compilation. In FOSS we often hold up the community as one of the strongest aspects of our success relative or otherwise.
The idea of community is important to open source advocates. After all, our software is used, developed, tested, and paid for by the community; and, as such, it is vital to the improvement of the software itself. As with any community, FOSS communities tend to rely on the structure within the community itself. Users often play the role of testers and bug reporters, testers often take on development roles, and developers sometimes lead communication efforts. The end result is an agile ecosystem for software to grow and mature in. The success of this model is undeniable, you only have to look at a few key technologies to see the open source model's viability in an ecosystem littered with proprietary systems that often fail to address the wants and needs of their users.
As with most things, I find the governance and management models within FOSS to be analogous to the same models within the US government. In FOSS, projects that are not open with their network of users and testers, tend to witness a revolt of sorts which sometimes leads to an entirell directioy new project "forked" from the original. The same thing happens in our own government, especially when a politician is being particularly douchey (recall elections, anyone?).
When those projects are engaging their community, addressing their users' needs and wants, and following the objectives and directives set forth by the users they attracted, they are awarded. This is how projects gain corporate involvement, more development interest, and acceptance into incentive programs like Google's Summer of Code. This type of benefit is often of a positive feedback nature, as developer interest increases, features and functionality become available, opinion of the product improves, and it starts again with interest increasing (starting the whole cycle over again.
Taking a lesson from FOSS, we can see that government isn't much different. When politicians keep a finger on, and react to, the pulse of their constituents,we tend to favor them the next time around. When they fail to listen and respond to that pulse, we tend to speak with our votes.