Every open source project claims to welcome contributions. Most of the friction is structural and visible before you write a line of code. Here is a grading rubric you can apply to a repository in five minutes, and what each grade means for whether your pull request will ever merge.
A — make setup && make test works on a clean machine, or there is a devcontainer that does the same. C — a README with eight manual steps, two of which mention versions that no longer exist. F — the test suite requires credentials to a service only maintainers can access. This is the highest-leverage thing a project controls: a contributor who cannot run the tests will not send a fix, they will patch their own fork and disappear.
A — good first issue labels applied to issues with a description of the expected change and a pointer to the relevant file. C — labels exist but are applied to three-year-old issues nobody has looked at. F — hundreds of open issues, no labels, and a bot that closes anything untouched for 60 days, which silently deletes the project's own bug backlog.
A — under ten minutes, runs on the pull request without maintainer approval for known contributors, and failure output points at the failing assertion. C — 45 minutes, and first-time contributors need a maintainer to click approve, so a typo costs two round trips across time zones. F — flaky tests that fail randomly and a culture of "just re-run it", which trains everyone to ignore red.
A — a DCO sign-off, which is one git commit -s. B — a corporate CLA with an automated bot, annoying but a one-time cost. D — a CLA requiring a scanned signature or an employer's legal review, which ends most drive-by contributions outright.
A — a first response within a week, even if that response is "not now, here is why". C — a month of silence, then a review requesting changes, then more silence. F — merged pull requests from maintainers only, with external ones accumulating until they conflict and get closed as stale. Look at the last twenty closed pull requests from non-maintainers: the merge ratio and the time-to-first-comment tell you more than any CONTRIBUTING file.
A — more than one active maintainer, a documented decision process, and a release cadence you can predict. D — one person, unpaid, doing everything. That is not a criticism of them; it is a risk you should price in before you build a product on it. Check the commit history for how many distinct people have merged in the last six months.
If you maintain something and want a better report card, the order of return is: make setup one command, label ten issues properly, cut CI time in half, and answer new contributors within a week even when the answer is no. None of those require writing more code, and together they change who is willing to help you.
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