Community and policy

The composition of the community is a function of the policies we have in place. With certain policies, we will attract participation from people who like those policies. People who don't like those policies will avoid participating.

If our policies appear to represent some particular point of view, then people who share this point of view will participate with a degree of enthusiasm that leaves their viewpoint overrepresented.

Thus the policies we adopt determine the nature of the community's bias.

This can be expressed pseudo-mathematically as: f(p) = c

where 'p' is our policies and 'c' is the community.

A change in policy from 'p' to 'p1' will result in the community 'c' changing to 'c1', as the change alienates some people who had previously participated, while attracting others to participate, or to participate more.

The community will always support 'p' as it is, because it is that set of policies that attracted the community in the first place. The community will likely oppose any change from 'p' to 'p1'. An initial reluctance to change 'p' to 'p1' might be overcome if we believe the resulting community 'c1' will be just as active as the current community 'c'.

If decision-making is filtered through the community - and especially if the community is given some clearly defined role - we risk creating a positive feedback loop, whereby the community only supports change in the direction of its pre-existing biases. The community and the Foundation would become increasingly narrowly defined as these biases constrain what we can do or become. 'c' will cause the ossification of 'p', leaving the Foundation incapable of creative change. The functionaries will have replaced the visionaries.

We avoid this so long as policy decisions can be made without the need to conform policy to pre-existing biases.