This helped me to blend in, meet the more general community, and finally take interest in higher level issues such as our infamous chat platforms split, or co-organising the GSoC 2021. I have a very strong interest in people, groups of them, ethics, how software impacts them all and how proper governance can help to achieve goals.
As a member of the board, I would focus on our internal and external communication, where we have a lot of room for improvement. Attracting new contributors is essential: our public face and the messages we send must resonate with their values. Once they are here, the bottleneck for their contributions must be removed: what they can do and where to do it must be clear, how to do it as well. While getting new recruits is extremely important for a project to stay in good shape, sustainability cannot be achieved without taking care of long time contributors.
I am strongly biased towards think for a bit but start doing quickly, ask around how it impacted others, and adapt rather than overthinking. I believe KPIs are necessarily biased and get circumvented all the time. Human interactions is how you measure success.
As the head of digital identity of a large organisation, I am experienced in projects aiming to lower the friction for customer onboarding. Quite counter-intuitively, many parallels can be drawn between corporate customers and non-profit contributors.
Open-source software communities used to despise designers and thought they knew better. Now we welcome them and see the positive impact they have. A second mentality change needs happen: we must allow the persons who are good at hyping others to help.
Regards,
Thib