Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

A knowledge differential is a power dynamic, and if your system is not documented to a degree that people can wholly independently understand it, you hold power over them and should be taking on the corresponding responsibilities

@xarvh @freakazoid I don't personally believe that a "great community" story is *fundamentally* harder or more complicated to understand.

I do think that it is harder to understand in this very moment and context, where people have not become accustomed to such narratives due to the prominence of individualist narratives.

Ultimately we understand most things in the context of those things that we are already familiar with, and so I think that "which story is the easiest to understand" mostly boils down to "which story do people see the most" in the end.

This is actually also why I think that we need more representation of communal efforts and structures in various media. It helps people become familiar with the mechanics of such a society, and makes it easier to understand them as applied to the real world.

I would encourage you to identify who the tech dude is in *your* FOSS community with a governance problem, and start drawing more attention to their role in the issue

@freakazoid Oh yes, that is absolutely the root of it.

@freakazoid Oh, certainly, I think it's very important that we actually do that work, and I don't think that the man-on-a-pedestal approach is a *good* one.

I only wanted to emphasize that fixing this problem is a long process that involves commitment from a lot of people; not something we can "just" do. That doesn't make it impossible of course, it's just important to acknowledge that it is hard :)

@freakazoid Or to put it more succinctly: the exact same task is made 10x harder by social norms if you are a group of people trying to work together rather than a singular Dude With A Vision.

@freakazoid That's easier said than done, unfortunately. There's not exactly a widespread collective skill at collaborative project management (or resource pool for it), and often collaborative projects end up stalling.

That's not because the model fundamentally doesn't work - but because everything in society optimizes for the mythical man-on-a-pedestal, and all the social processes that people learn and resource distribution mechanisms are optimized for that.

Moving away from that model is going to require an active effort at teaching people to work and coordinate together, and to create the circumstances in which people *can* work on such things (given their lack of privilege, and resulting disadvantage in time and money).

Perhaps the most frustrating part of this all is that if the situation continues for long enough, lateral violence often starts happening - nobody can hold the dude at the top accountable, therefore people start trying to hold *each other* accountable, even if nobody involved in those conflicts actually has the power to do anything about it