Something that stands out to me, both in this discussion and in prior governance conversations, is that a number of people are extremely reluctant to ever proactively prevent anyone from doing anything, and instead choose to varyingly ask people (often implicitly) to “trust the actor/process” or “compete harder”. This is not a sustainable approach.
If the envisioned bad outcome truly is unlikely to happen, then explicitly forbidding or preventing that outcome should be a no-brainer. Instead we end up dancing around the issue and arguing for months, with ultimately nothing happening, all the while the problematic process in question continues to take place unimpeded (and all too frequently results in exactly the envisioned bad outcome).
The trust you are asking people to have is not there. It is not going to be there either, no matter how convinced you, personally are that the actor in question has good intentions. You cannot build on trust that doesn’t exist.
Likewise, you can call for ‘competition’ all you want (whether phrased in business terms or in terms of “funding community work instead”, which boils down to the same thing in the end), but none of that is going to fix the very real practical problems that prevent such ‘solutions’ from actually working out. If this approach worked, we wouldn’t have been seeing a constant string of governance problems for the past many years. So clearly it doesn’t.
So can we just cut to the chase and actually talk about meaningful, restrictive solutions to these issues, without constantly terminating the useful parts of the discussion by trying relitigate “is it our place to do anything at all”? And can people finally learn to get over their emotional discomfort with telling someone (or being told) “no”?
This is not in response to any one particular post, but a general request to all involved.