The plan is that popular mods would be included with th egame for users to chooes from. Not integrated into official canon. But popula rmods, online will effectively become canon.
I guess that opens a whole other can of worms for me. Personally I don't feel that the balance by committee approach would yield better results than the way things currently are.
Even though really easy changes like tweaking priest exp, rebalancing HoL etc. might have been, fool-proof changes that the community would have had a much shorter turnaround time on, I really don't think a larger group of people would have yielded better results when it comes to things like tweaking glove balance or what to do with BotF.
Personally I think a communal approach would steer the game into a quickdraw competition with nerfed HP and bloated DPS. 
Also I feel it absolves GPG of responsibility to make official balance changes. I'm sure I just sound super negative here so I'll stop, but that's my initial impression of it.