When startups, non-profits, governments, or creators start a community, they hope to get many newcomers to participate and contribute.

When it comes to gathering contributions, most successful projects often have the opposite problem: they attract too many low-quality contributions or the wrong contributions around an individual creator.

This creates more work for maintainers, and often they collapse under excessive demand for their attention.

After studying hundreds of open communities, I've witnessed this problem crippling many projects that could thrive by changing how they invite newcomers.

Most communities have a handful of folks maintaining the projects and making the bulk of the contributions.

For example, Bootstrap, a popular design framework used by around 20% of the web, has only three developers authoring over 73% of the commits.

So here are two steps to manage a high volume of contributions, not only in open source but in most online or offline communities:

1/ Improve contribution guidelines to improve and reduce friction to contribute

Map out the journey to contribute:

• Why should they participate?

• What skills and tools do they need to learn to contribute?

• Where can they contribute?

• What’s a first tangible engagement you can point your new members towards, so it’s stupid simple for them to dip their toes into your community?

• How should they submit their contributions?

• How can you show your appreciation to your new members once they bring in a valuable contribution?

2/ Create New Leaders

Pay attention to who keeps showing up, and when you find genuine and qualified contributors, invite them to become leaders in your community.

3/ Reduce technical scope

A project with a large ecosystem of contributions can be more vulnerable, as it increases the number of dependencies managed by different developers or creators increases the potential for problems.

So fostering a modular approach is more resilient. If one plugin or package disappears, it should be easier for the project's managers to contain the problem and find or create a substitute since it is smaller in scope.

These steps will increase the available attention you can give the project and keep your community thriving.