I feel like this could possibly be addressed in a descriptive, rather than prescriptive way. A summary of “here’s all the work that’s been going on in Nixpkgs” would help with this, without requiring extra work or commitment from everybody doing the work. This would also avoid the problem of “who’s in the team”, etc. @matklad was talking in another thread about how summaries of discussions have worked well for the Rust project, where people were having trouble keeping up with long discussions spread across lots of different places. Maybe we need summaries of work done as well. These summaries would also be a good place to tell people how to get involved with a particular area, etc. I’m an avid reader of LWN, which is basically work summaries for kernel development, usually written by people who specialise in keeping up with the work and writing about it, rather than the people actually doing the work themselves, and I’d love something like that for Nixpkgs.
I’m good at programming, and keeping up with what’s going on, and I think I’m quite good at the human parts of finding solutions to (reasonably sized) technical problems. I’m not good at keeping a schedule, organising, or writing. I can’t commit to attending regular meetings. If those things become requirements for contributing to Nixpkgs at the level I currently do, I’m not going to be able to do it, and I know it’s not just me who’s in that situation. I feel like when teams get brought up, it’s often with the expectation that the people who work in whatever area will just start doing those things. If we were approaching all this with the idea of people with that second skillset supporting people with the first, that would be quite different to me. But the teams I’ve seen so far have not been that.