As an open community grows the amount of external contributions increases with it. This is one of the primary benefits of open communities: the assimilation of progress from a wide and diverse pool of talent. However, care must be taken to ensure that the process of acceptance is free from social friction, lest arguments bring down and delay development of the project. This lightning talk covers the social issues open community maintainers and external contributors face during the submission of a patch or other change, why conflicts arise between parties, and how to handle difficult public disagreements to bring threads of discussions back on topic to focus on the benefit of the project and community. Synergy is when multiple parties come together to produce something greater than the sum of their parts, and it's what we will strive for in this talk.