If only these drive-by contributors would be around to maintain the stuff like secretaries that would be a dream. As it is, I think you may have the roles reversed: the maintainers are not there to merge your patch and look after it in perpetuity.

The entire purpose of these responses is to repel the drive-by contributor who invariably generates clerical work for the full-time maintainer. It's just a sad fact about the nature of this work that it's often done by volunteers who are massively overloaded, and "contributions" are often so minuscule or low quality that they are actually just additional time-demands on already-overworked maintainers.

There is a good book about this: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Public-Making-Maintenance-Sof...

I will take this opportunity to mention Nadia Eghbal's book covering her work researching open source projects & communities. Super relevant:

https://www.amazon.com/Working-Public-Making-Maintenance-Sof...

I heard her on a podcast[1] talking about her book Work in Public[2] and loved it, is that the work and writing you're referencing?

If not, are there other pieces you'd recommend?

[1]: https://a16z.com/2020/08/01/working-in-public-communities-op... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578675862/

Wow, that sounds extremely useful! I haven't contributed to any FOSS projects in a meaningful way (yet), but I imagine that lots of potential contributors spend an inordinate amount of time trying to familiarize themselves with structure, conventions, and how everything fits together. Having all of that information in one, well-documented place could definitely help with getting up to speed/creating a mental model for the project faster.

On a semi-related front, I'm also interested in lowering the threshold for participation in FOSS projects, but I approached things from the lens of helping potential contributors better grok/intuit the social/organizational structure of a project. To that end, I made small badges that projects can add to their READMEs to indicate, to a rough approximation, what "type" of project they are[0]. The project types are described in a really interesting book called Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software[1] by Nadia Eghbal.

[0]: https://project-types.github.io/ [1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578675862/