Improve project organization

Proposed improvements to project organization.

This organization change has 3 goals:

1) Make the project more open and accessible
2) Make the project more scalable
3) Do this in an incremental way, without unnecessary refactoring

The actual organization change is covered in 6a99b8dea935be9228a47c84bcbfb7491e6e5584. Cosmetic changes are discussed in #9177 and #9178 
The rationale is to only define all this once, and then refer to people only by their canonical nickname as defined in `people`. This is useful because people tend to wear multiple hats. It's also better than defaulting to people's github handle. Sometimes people have different handles in irc, github, twitter etc. and I prefer to have a canonical handle defined by the project.