i’m all for periodic contributions through channels like open collective but bounties rarely get to the point of being persuading.
for a couple of years now my favorite foss project has been blender bim addon and its community osarch.
it has a unique aspect. the software stack it’s trying to be an alternative of includes giants like autodesk, nemetchek etc. although it’s a gigantic shoe to fill, it has been really really successful at doing what it’s doing. i have been using it for a year now and cannot fathom to go back.
the community consists of experienced construction sector people and a decent amount of them are directly involved in the software development, be it coding, bug triage, educational content, technical support etc.
i guess the thing that makes a project tick is having a working state software, the degree to which is not important, and being community oriented.
R. because it’s really easy to work on spreadsheets. i know there’s pandas for python but at that time RStudio made it look really attractive. i will do anything not to work on excel.