# Event Discovery Without Onboarding Produces False Mental Models ## Claim When an invitation announces access without explaining participation, newcomers fill the gap with their own — usually wrong — assumptions about who belongs and what's expected. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Holds for any invitation-based system (a dashboard widget, an event listing, a "get involved" page) that surfaces an opportunity without a companion explanation of prerequisites, first steps, and expected outcome. - The false models can point in opposite directions from the same missing information: one reader may assume the opportunity is beneath them, another that it's beyond them. Both suppress participation. - Does not claim that better explanation alone guarantees attendance or contribution — motivation and access barriers (cost, time, disability) are separate constraints this doesn't address. ## Evidence The author used WordPress commercially for sixteen years before recognizing its volunteer contribution system, because the dashboard events widget showed *that* WordCamps exist without showing *why* they'd matter to him. At the event itself, two experienced users held opposite exclusionary assumptions — one that nothing new remained to learn, another that participation required passing a technical exam — both wrong, both sufficient to keep someone away. ## Links - [[DevRel MOC]] — why announcing access without explaining participation actively misleads newcomers - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Contribution Pipeline Needs a Defined Next Step After Training]] — because contrasts: that note is about losing prepared people *after* training when the next step is undefined; this note is about losing people *before* they ever start, when the invitation itself is undefined. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Choice Overload Stalls Adoption in an Already-Motivated Population]] — because extends: both locate a real adoption blocker in missing structure rather than missing motivation, just at different points in the funnel (before the decision to start vs. during execution). - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Open Source Governance MOC]] — because applies-in: contributor discovery design is governance infrastructure, not marketing. ## Tests / falsifiers - Compare attendance/contribution-start rates between an event page that states prerequisites, first task, and outcome explicitly versus one that only states date, location, and topic. - If newcomers who received explicit onboarding material still report the same "is this for me?" hesitation at the same rate, the mechanism here (missing explanation, not missing motivation) would be falsified for that population. ## Maintenance - Last tended: 2026-08-16 - Next review: 2026-11-16 ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Why It Took Me 16 Years to Contribute to WordPress]] — the discovery-vs-onboarding distinction and the two-mental-model contrast.