I feel like one of the most fundamental problems of open-access (including online) communities is the asymmetry of policymaking discussions.

If you have made a well-considered but unintuitive policy decision, and you have already done all the work of reasoning through the implications, an influx of new people will forever keep trying to recycle discussions that you've already had and are already tired of.

But the people newly coming in have never had this discussion before, and are not familiar with the rationale! And even if they are willing to 'take the culture as it is' and learn it gradually over time, it's very difficult to know what is expected of you without having access to the background.

And so you end up with the same discussions and arguments being rehashed over and over again, eventually burning out the people doing the policymaking and causing the whole thing to fall apart.

And so far, I have not seen any credible mitigations for this problem, because "read the manual before doing anything" is an unreasonable ask and so is "you will just have to accept that those are the rules", in the general case.

@joepie91 i think the only way for a group to be truly open to new people is to have people around who are willing to have those same conversations many times. you never know when a new perspective will reveal something you’ve never thought of before and you also have a much better chance of making people feel like they are actually being heard and included

@crash I think that part of the problem with that approach is exactly that it is easy for the new perspective to drown in books worth of recycled discussion, because the newcomer has no idea what has already been discussed... I would like to see something more sustainable, that scopes the conversation to those new perspectives specifically

@joepie91 i think my approach is to have the conversation with the newcomer, rather than just recycling old materials and saying to read the docs or whatever. like, just engaging with people who are asking questions in good faith. a policy doesn’t mean anything without creating a culture where it makes sense to follow it and part of that is helping folks understand where it’s coming from if it’s unclear

@crash I try to do the same, but I've never seen this actually be sustainable in the long term :/ Just gradually burning out the people doing this, especially on hotly debated topics