As an OSS maintainer that is currently struggling with this I can tell you the solutions are not that simple:

- We use several mailing lists (like a forum its good for async communication)

- We have several IRC channels for immediate feedback

- We don't have glitters/slack/discord/etc because more avenues of communication actually makes us scale less

- reviews are not rubber stamps

- we use github to host our repos and as a ticketing system

- we have developer docs (sometimes they do lag or are incomplete)

We still have much larger backlog than we want and plenty of people mad/exasperated on our scale and turnaround for versions and features.

I don't think UI is an issue as much as other factors, many other things will affect the project.

As for the communication channels, a good community actually offloads work from maintainers. As users get to know/use the project and pay attention to the channels, they end up doing a lot of support and freeing the maintainers to work on the code. To get to this point the maintainers have to have put in the work and have helped the community gain the knowledge needed. That said, it is not a license for maintainers to check out, just a good way to share the burden.

Github has a huge community around it, but it's ticketing system is limited and not great for big projects, they are working hard to fix this, releasing many updates and features this last year that have made our lives easier, but it is still an issue (see "open letters" from last year for details).

Much time is spent dealing with insufficient data from users/contributors or just plain unreasonable requests: "soo this does not work in AIX 4.1 (current is 7.2?) with custom built python 2.4 from which you removed core libraries and a non POSIX custom built grep? no .. we don't have tests for this". A good ticketing system can help, but it will not solve the issue (skynet might, but that might be too drastic).

A factor is maintainer 'control', it is hard to let others 'raise your baby', specially as their vision might diverge from yours. Even w/o sparking flamewars there is a constant time sink in discussion of ideas, feature set and roadmaps. Design by comity or popularity does not normally lead to good results either and IME sparks more flamewars than it avoids.

Another is code quality, most projects start w/o a big test infrastructure (one guy really doesn't need much), once you have hundreds of contributors you struggle to get proper linting, testing, access to resources, etc.

No one writes perfect code, no one can perfectly review code, more code == more bugs == slower turnaround.

Reviews are a bottleneck .. yet they are the primary guarantee for code and interface quality. Rubber stamps will create more work for you in the end as you'll spend multiple cycles fixing bad code , tests can only help you so much so much of the burden falls on the maintainers.

Tests are code too! People forget this and put little/no review into tests or have many trivial tests (check that setters/getters actually work...) to get 100% code coverage. Code coverage is not a goal, code quality is. The point here is that test are also a lot of work, specially getting them 'right' for your project, what this means is also fodder for flame wars. Not having good testing, also creates more work as more bugs will get into the code.

Most contributors won't maintain their code, many in OSS will contribute code and then disappear, any problem with it has to be dealt with by either the maintainers or someone else in the community that might also 'contribute and evaporate'. As code bases grow and features are added, the maintainers increase their burden. This is alleviated by increasing maintainer numbers, but that is always trailing the burden by a lot.

Adding too many maintainers, it gets to a point that adding maintainers creates more burden, coordination, design decisions, knowledge sharing, etc ... team management in general.

...

I'm going to stop now, I could probably write many pages on this but I think the above is enough to show that this is not easily solved by using a few new tools or UI, docs do help, but that is another maintainer burden.

Maintainers normally just use what 'works for them' and most will look to improve the process. We all get many suggestions, it is impractical to try them all and the 'latest trend' dies down faster than the time it takes one to shift the workflow to try it. The few times I've been able to do so, it is either not an improvement or just not enough of one to justify the effort of switching the workflow.

If someone has a way to make managing big|popular OSS projects simple and seamless ... LET ME KNOW!