I kind of think organic projects need to be a little shielded from the entire world to grow. To contribute to a walled garden you need to prove to the gardners

I kind of think organic projects need to be a little shielded from the entire world to grow. To contribute to a walled garden you need to prove to the gardners that you're not going to destroy everything they've strived towards, even if what you're proposing is more efficient or better. Make friends with the Gardner's first, talk to them on their level, prove to them you're willing to jump a little. If you stake nothing of yourself but demand to be let in to let your contributing be known there's a risk that the whole project will lose focus, sure not after first or the second, but maybe after the 10th or 20th contributor with their own destabilising vision of how things should work. Open source projects need to be democracies from the get go in order to fascilliate such chaos. Otherwise, contributors need to prove that they're at least a little sympathetic to the long term goals of the original authors.