The problem is that we haven't created theory and tools for online governance. We just went with dictatorship. If using a piece of software automatically made me part of the community of that piece of software, we'd have something. Only to the extent that I felt like participating of course, but if software would aid that, in a uniform manner, across projects, that would be an achievement.
The code has been treated as the end-all be-all, but projects get rewritten. The important part is the institution. We've been regularly concentrating that institution into one unpaid or poorly paid guy, until it gets handed to some corporate vulture who thinks of the users as prey.
The irony of this situation is that a backlog of PRs means that you have a overwhelming surplus of people willing to do free work. Seeing it as a problem is some sort of ideological failure. We just hate democracy and losing control so much that we're willing to starve surrounded by food.
The tension is that people start with writing code to scratch an itch and share it freely. Every bit of community management pulls away from sitting down and coding a personal project. Even accepting the free work of others.
There are people who like doing both, but someone publishing their code online doesn't imply that. And it certainly doesn't imply that they hate democracy.
This is to say, I do agree software and especially open source is a ripe bed to experiment with different ways to organize!