I used to be active in a few distributions 20 years ago – when I still had time for that – and I also feel documentation and general news and changelog reporting are absolutely crucial. We can come up with the greatest code and technical solutions; if nobody knows about them, all that work will go unused. Clearly communicating simple facts such as what it is, how it can be used, where a project is going, what its trade-offs are, contributes to the "friendliness" factor around a project.
I used to be rather critical about the identity groups approach some projects got into – we're all in the same project after all – but truth is that it's very important for open-source software to attract people that don't think of themselves as hardcore hackers because without that more diverse skill set, a project is just a proverbial tree falling in the forest.
I used to be rather critical about the identity groups approach some projects got into – we're all in the same project after all – but truth is that it's very important for open-source software to attract people that don't think of themselves as hardcore hackers because without that more diverse skill set, a project is just a proverbial tree falling in the forest.