Several open source software organizations are remarkable. Not little remarkable, big remarkable. As in they show us how alternative models to the typical corporate business model may well be far superior as a way for people to collaborate. For the most part these remarkable are unknown. I have used Debian for (ahem) a very long time without knowing much about the organization and this article was a very good introduction.
I have been aware of the IETF for quite a while. What is most amazing is that the internet today was built (more-or-less) by the IETF. See The Tao of IETF (https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/tao/). This is an organization with no members. It just works. Hardly anyone really knows about it.
Just as interesting is what happened when the corporate world decided to compete with the IETF for control of how the internet worked. Some people call this the protocol wars. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars). For a while it seemed like each month the OSI would announce a project to replace parts of the internet, like TCP, with an X.protocol. Of these efforts very few survived and thrived - like X.509.
The question that comes to my mind is whether these kind of democratic type collaborative organizations are in fact superior (far superior?) to the traditional corporate model. I personally have watched many corporations act with obvious stupidity. Doing things that can only be described as severely fight-their-way-out-of-a-paper-bag challenged. To put it kindly.
Certainly these other-style organizations do not really stack up on an economic basis. The income of most corporations dwarfs that of both the IETF and Debian. And yet as a contributor and creator, I can ask Cuo Bono? Certainly not the contributors, they subsist.
And perhaps most interesting to me, and perhaps worth an experiment, is whether it is possible to use an IETF or Debian style model that competes with the corporate model. It did work once with the Protocol Wars, so maybe.
(edit to remove markdown syntax, sigh)