Did you consider including some form of "Liquid Democracy" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting#Delegated_voting, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_Democracy) in your software? Some of the pirate parties in the world do favor such a model. I think this is a good compromise between effort to be done by every participant (effort in the sense of getting informed on a specific topic to make the right decision in the vote) and self-determination.

The other possibility of being everything regulated by free market, IMHO does not work, because of "informational friction". Customers will need to be (timely) informed to decide, when to buy a service and give their vote to a specific company and when not. Nowadays with web and mobile networks this is much less of an issue, but the problem remains, that these services are provided by companies, who then would have very much power. Also how do you prevent companies teaming up behind the scenes instead of being competitors? There will be needed a third party, which has the power to regulate these issues.