I always wonder why most projects don't have an onboarding process where you get in touch with the maintainers and discuss the roadmap and how to help even if you personally don't have a specific issue you want to work on. For me I submit pull requests to open source projects when I personally need them and then leave once the work is complete. That's basically the opposite of what it takes to retain maintainers. Maintainers usually write code for the sake of others and not for themselves and they stay for much longer periods of time.