Nudging the Community Behaviors for Greater Sustainability

Two years ago I started to look at the Drupal.org site in order to inspire more and better collaboration. Building on ideas from the Drupal Prairie Initiative, the UK government's Behavioural Insights Team and others, I wanted to explore what can we do to make the website be more like our community events?

Most of my efforts were tagged with the maintain in the issue queue. I did this because I saw that mid-way through Drupal 7's lifespan we were having more challenges than ever in maintaining code. It became common place for developers to simply not release stable releases of their modules, issue queues have grown and not been well maintained, etc...

There have been some great improvements in Drupal.org, especially in the last year. Much of the effort seems to have gone into much needed infrastructure work. What can we do to build a better experience? How can we make it easier to try new things, evaluate whether they are beneficial to the community and start making decisions based on data rather than opinions?

We have to be able to have rational discussions about things like "gamification", badges, and other approaches that are being evaluated by other large open-source communities.