Actually it's not. Looking at what is on Github, it seems that the project is mainly about bridging a few open-source modules (kaldi, sphinx, pocketsphinx, openephyra) together to make an end-to-end system. So if you want to contribute, you can always work on improving one of the base modules (that handle things like speech recognition, question answering, etc).
"I can't help but wonder, though, if the way we tend to go about it can really affect change in a meaningful way. How many people are actually going to go through the effort of setting this up and running it? And keep it running? And put up with inevitable bugs? And updating it? How well can it inter-operate with other types of services? While they've gone above and beyond to document a contribution policy and use GitHub Issues, is it only possible to add a feature by hacking on a huge, monolithic project?"
How do ideas and open source generally work? How does a tree grow?
This project is trying to provide replacements for Google's various Android services:
This fits into that sort of attitude. I have not idea how mature or useable microg is.
I can't help but wonder, though, if the way we tend to go about it can really affect change in a meaningful way. How many people are actually going to go through the effort of setting this up and running it? And keep it running? And put up with inevitable bugs? And updating it? How well can it inter-operate with other types of services? While they've gone above and beyond to document a contribution policy and use GitHub Issues, is it only possible to add a feature by hacking on a huge, monolithic project?
I don't know the best path forward, but it seems like the first few questions could be addressed by something like sandstorm or docker. The rest is architectural, and it's not a problem with this project so much as it's a lack of a standard for extensibility or interoperability in the OSS community, which has enough trouble getting past issues of language and init system preferences..