I think this is intended as a general fact--I'm inclined to say "theorem"--about communities, and there was not much of a notion that you would need specific in

I think this is intended as a general fact--I'm inclined to say "theorem"--about communities, and there was not much of a notion that you would need specific information about a particular community to say that the fact applied to it. Anyway... One advantage of diversity is automatic specialization. Different people have somewhat different strengths and problems, and they develop different skills that are best in either leveraging their strengths or solving their problems. This has the specific benefit that if some threat to everyone in the community suddenly becomes much worse, then (in a diverse community) there will probably be some people who are already specializing in solving that problem, because they or their friends (employers, customers, whatever) suffered from that problem in the past. To take the case of a community that does open-source programming: If, suddenly, a lot of people start caring deeply about performance, it would be a good thing if there already were a couple of people who had figured out techniques to increase performance. Those people might be people trying to run a large business on a low budget, people who hate or suck at multi-threading and worked hard at making primitive operations go faster, people who hate low-level stuff and worked hard at learning to parallelize tasks, and so on. All of these people would have specialized skills that would now become valuable to the community, which could now pick up those skills more quickly and with less pain than if no one had those skills and they had to invent them from scratch.