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/