As a community moderator and maintainer, I keep coming back to something Donella Meadows wrote: "Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned... We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone."
What made this year's growth possible was embracing messiness as a feature, and doing our best to solve real problems emerging from that messiness while leaving room for systems and models to advance and adapt. The looseness created velocity, which I watched unfold in a flood of discussions, PRs, and issues.
As someone who's merged hundreds of pull requests across MCP repos, I still feel like I'm barely keeping up with this velocity. I mean that in the most positive way. Better patterns and practices are emerging from the sheer volume of contributions and breadth of experience and expertise represented in the contributor community. As a random person from the Internet, I appreciate that pretty much anyone can bring something to the table. This includes standout maintainers like Cliff Hall, who raises the bar for reviewing, testing, and giving feedback, and Jonathan Hefner, who's done the same for documentation.
As Darren Shepard recently put it:
'People think the value of MCP is the protocol. The value is getting people to agree and do something.'
MCP gives people a reason to coordinate and talk about the same thing. Helping to enable that coordination and discussion has been a lot of fun, and it keeps me coming back.