# Tool Familiarity Not Tool Power Determines Who Can Contribute ## Claim A volunteer or rotating-staff contributor base publishes more freely on the platform its members already happen to know than on the platform with the most features. ## Evidence **Source**: [[3. Resources/Literature Notes/From Divi to FSE Moving a Small Non-Profit Aaron Jorbin]] AMUN's Divi-built site required volunteers to learn Divi specifically, not just WordPress, to make even small edits — collapsing the pool of people who could safely publish down to the small tech team, "out of fear for breaking the website." Choosing stock WordPress/FSE instead meant contributors only needed the general skill most of them already had. ## Scope & conditions - Holds when: the contributor pool is rotating, non-technical, or part-time (volunteer orgs, small nonprofits, community projects) and turns over often enough that a tool-specific learning curve has to be paid repeatedly, not once. - Breaks when: the org has stable, trained staff who can absorb a tool-specific learning curve a single time and then retain that fluency indefinitely — there the feature-power of the tool can matter more than its familiarity. ## Links - [[Commons & Community Governance MOC]] — because applies-in: contribution capacity in volunteer/nonprofit open-source communities is directly governed by this tool-familiarity bottleneck. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Abstracting Drudgery Re-Opens Creative Work to Non-Specialists]] — contrasts: that note describes a *temporal cycle* (abstraction widens access, then re-narrows as new specialization forms); this claim is a *static* comparison between two tools available right now, no cycle implied - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Phased Migrations That Ship a Shared Layer First De-Risk the Rest]] — contrasts: a different migration-strategy claim from an adjacent WordPress case; that note is about de-risking the cutover itself, this one is about who can contribute once you're on the other side <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ -->