Summary

We have now completed 9 discovery sessions for DevAsign. Consistent themes around manual contributor onboarding, review bottlenecks, fragmented communications, and the growing need for AI‑driven automation continue to surface.

Cal.com, our first large‑scale commercial OSS project (active bounty program, >1 000 open issues, ~250 open PRs), validated many of the earlier pain points while adding new enterprise‑grade requirements (e.g., SOC 2, dynamic code‑owner routing, AI‑assisted smart‑merge pipelines).

OSS projects we interviewed include:

1. Cal.com (video, Keith Williams)
2. SubImage (email, Alex Chantavy)
3. Ratatui (video, Orhun Parmaksız)
4. JulepAI (video, Ishita Jindal)
5. SorobanByExample (call, Andrew Miracle)
6. UppTime (email, Anand Chowdhary)
7. Crawl4AI (video, Aravind Karnem)
8. Semantic-Release (video, Tony Brix)
9. rqlite (video, Philip O'Toole)

Methodology

• Asynchronous email exchange probing onboarding, task tracking, challenges, and “magic wand” feature desires.
• 15-minute video call & recap email post-call confirming current processes and top pain points. Probing into onboarding, documentation quality, contributor targeting, rewards, task workflow, and “magic‑wand” AI wishlist.

Main Challenges

1. Onboarding Issues: Most projects struggle with manual, inefficient contributor onboarding. Cal.com dedicates significant resources (1 engineer + 2 interns) to manage ~200 community PRs, while others like JulepAI lack basic documentation (README/CONTRIBUTING.md).
2. Communication Fragmentation: All projects use scattered communication channels (GitHub, Discord, Slack, email) leading to lost context and duplicated efforts. Cal.com alone has ~1,000 open issues with overly broad code-owner assignments.
3. Review Bottlenecks: Projects face a quality vs. retention dilemma. Cal.com's strict testing requirements stall community PRs for months, causing contributor drop-off. Other projects either compromise quality with insufficient reviews or overwhelm maintainers.