Joey Hess has an interesting blog post about the relationship between security models, group empowerment, and bitter strife within the debian project. His basic idea is that if strict permissions models can be relaxed (and security is not degraded somehow), people will be more excited about working on a project, they'll contribute more freely, and the work will flow smoother and simpler.

The idea isn't terribly shocking, of course, but he ties it into ideas about Wikis, and proposes some interesting things learned from wikis (and proto-wikis like the Debian Bug Tracking System). The basic idea is: anyone should be able to contribute easily and simply, but important changes and modifications should be trackable, have full review, be straightforward to revert, and authorship should be apparent (at least pseudonymously).

i found this link via a remark by Jeroen van Wolffelaar during the 2006 DPL debate (line 736).