It sounds vaguely interesting what existing knowledge there is on people working for free for a common cause out of their own volition, and where democracy comes into play.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch"
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch"
No, it isn't. You cannot put democracy itself to a "democratic" vote, that's a version of Russell's paradox.
In particular, deciding who gets to vote, even by voting, isn't democratic. The democratic decision must be potentially reversible.
The idea of democracy is to give everybody the same voice in decision making. There are different mechanisms to achieve that, direct voting is only one of them. Other mechanisms are consensus, random selection and representation. Each of the mechanisms has different strengths and weaknesses and should be used to decide different things. You can also combine them to an extent, for instance you can randomly select members of a jury who then decide by consensus.
But this won't really work with the legislature, because there we have all kind of incompatible ideologies. There is simply no consensus possible with the contemporary ideologies (socialism, liberalism, conservatism, etc.) by their very definition. If you insist on consensus, your decision making process will simply deadlock forever. How can you ever unlock it? By shifting to a almost-consensus aka direct democracy.
Consensus can work but only in a very small groups. That's why I explained that there are different methods to achieve democratic participation and have different trade-offs.
I don't think ideologies are big a problem for direct democracy. I think they are artifacts of representative system, where you have to choose a package of things, rather than when you can decide each issue in isolation. From what I heard, that actually happens in Switzerland - since everybody is sometimes in a minority in referendum, people don't take losing as a big deal.
If I were a developer, I wouldn't want to work on things that the vocal/voting people want to use. I want to work on the topics that I like. Even if the participants voted on something, it is not binding to anybody.
So how should we make non-reversible decisions?
You can make them however you want, for instance by voting, they just won't be democratic.