Both “great leaders” and shared governance can rot, nothing is pure. Leader-centric / “#stupidindividualism” – can work, strong individual leadership can produce positive outcomes, this path is strong when early-stage projects need speed and coherence, moments of crisis where coordination matters more than deliberation, visionary synthesis when no shared language exists yet. Historically, many projects only exist because one or two people pushed through inertia. That’s real.

The benefit is clarity, momentum, and decision velocity. The cost is hidden, deferred, and structural. Leader-centric systems rot, almost always fail in predictable ways: succession failure (what happens when the leader burns out, dies, or changes?), myth-making replaces accountability, disagreement becomes personal betrayal, values drift accelerates once scale or money enters. This rot is catastrophic, everything looks fine until it suddenly isn’t.

Shared governance and open process has other failure modes, it fails differently. When shared governance works there is a shared direction even if there’s disagreement on method, people accept unfinishedness, trust precedes rules, power is treated as something to circulate, not hoard. This is why federated systems work better than monoliths, they don’t need everyone aligned – they need enough alignment locally.

How shared governance rots is about noise, mismatched visions, process fetishism, endless discussion with no production. This is rot by dilution, not domination. The distinction is that shared governance doesn’t fail because there’s too much democracy. It fails because there’s no gardening. The compost metaphor isn’t only poetic – it’s operational, compost is not “anything goes”. Compost works because: inputs are constrained, time matters, turning matters, bad material is broken down, not allowed to dominate

In social paths composting means that bad ideas aren’t banned, but they’re depowered, noise isn’t amplified, conflict is metabolised, not performed, unfinished work is expected, not punished. This is where most “open” projects fail, they open input, but never govern flow.

Does this scale? Or does attention rot it? Attention always brings rot, there is no version of scale that doesn’t attract: careerists, ideology tourists, control-seekers, people looking for identity rather than contribution. The mistake is thinking you can prevent this, you can’t. What you can do is design for survivable rot. OMN’s approach (and similar paths) assume rot is inevitable, conflict is normal, bad faith is periodic, misunderstanding is constant

So instead of prevention, you build filters, loose coupling (people can leave without damage), low barrier to exit, moderate barrier to influence, contribution > opinion, process over charisma, forks are allowed, capture is not

This is why tone is not neutral – it acts as a filter, hostility, and “scaring away the right people” is an issue that deserves honesty. Yes – some good people are put off by sharp language, that’s real, I’ve seen it happen. But the uncomfortable truth is learned the hard way, softening tone attracts more people early, but it attracts the wrong power dynamics later. In long-running projects, the people who demand comfort early often become blockers later, demand control when disagreement arises, moralise process instead of doing work, then collapse when ambiguity appears.

Sharp language is not about anger, it’s about boundary-setting in advance. If someone can’t get past discomfort, they usually can’t handle the needed path of unfinished systems, horizontal accountability, slow value emergence and loss of status metrics This is not elitism – it’s pattern recognition over decades.

Then there is the question of funding, survival, and eating while resisting capture, people need to live. Some distilled lesson from examples:

• Externally funded projects scale fast and lose mission fast

• Self-funded projects keep integrity and burn out

• Volunteer-only projects are fragile to conflict

• Career-based projects become platforms, not commons

There is no clean solution, the OMN’s wager is not “no money forever”. It’s, no money before governance, no scale before culture, no funding without exit paths. Most projects reverse this order and die because of it. Why this looks vague (and why that’s not a bug) is that cultural infrastructure cannot be fully specified in advance without killing it. If it could, corporations would already own it.

The #OMN path is not a product, not a pitch, not a platform. It’s a set of constraints and practices that allow people to build things that don’t immediately collapse into hierarchy or careerism. That’s why it reads as incomplete, why it frustrates optimisation instincts, why it can survive longer than most projects.

The real trade-off:

• Individual-led systems fail spectacularly

• Shared systems fail invisibly

• Soft systems fail by capture

• Hard systems fail by fracture

#OMN is choosing a failure mode that is: slow, repairable, forkable and survivable. It’s not idealism, it’s engineering with human materials. It’s a path not for everyone, it never is, and doesn’t need to be. What is needed is enough people who understand why mess, slowness, and friction are features, not bugs – and who are willing to keep turning the compost instead of demanding a finished product.

That’s the work #KISS