# Authorship and Authority Are Separate Grants ## Claim The person who authored a community's vision holds a real, non-transferable role in keeping it, and that authorship confers no unappealable decision rights. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Evidence **Source**: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/You Are the Source of Your Community|You Are the Source of Your Community]] The essay states the authorship half without hedging: > [!quote] > "As a community creator, you are the source of the communities you create. Without you, the community doesn't exist." And defends it against the reflex to crowdsource direction: > [!quote] > "The audience doesn't know what they want. The audience only knows what's come before." Both are right, and neither establishes decision rights. Authorship is a claim about *origination* — this thing exists because someone imagined it, and asking participants to supply the vision produces a weaker version of what already exists. Authority is a claim about *governance* — who decides, who can be overruled, and what recourse a participant has. The essay's practical rule keeps them apart cleanly: elicit logistics from participants and vision from yourself. Ask what people need in order to attend; never ask what the thing should be. Conflating the two is how founder-led communities calcify. The founder's genuine authorship becomes the justification for unappealable decisions, and the community loses the correction mechanism that would have told it when the vision stopped fitting. ## Scope & conditions - Holds for communities with a genuine originating vision. Communities that emerged from a group have no single author, and the first half simply doesn't apply. - The essay's own warning — "we make ourselves and our visions smaller so that we don't ruffle feathers" — is the failure in the other direction, and it is real. This note argues for separating the grants, not for diluting authorship. - Where the community holds assets, labor, or livelihoods, the authority question becomes urgent regardless of how strong the authorship claim is. - The test is whether any decision the author makes can be appealed to something other than the author. ## Links - [[Commons & Community Governance MOC]] — separates the founder's real originating role from unappealable decision rights - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Concentrated Authority Without Accountability Produces the Same Failure Patterns Across Religious and Software Ecosystems]] — what happens when the two grants are conflated and never separated - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Recruiting Someone Into a System Obliges You to Disclose Who Owns It]] — extends: the disclosure duty that follows from holding authority over volunteers - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Open Source Project Market Share Tracks Founder Trust]] — applies-in: the measurable cost when founder authority outruns its accountability - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Belonging Requires Choice Connection and Progress]] — contrasts on which parts of a community can and cannot be authored