In my main project we added a new requirement that all new contributors meet a maintainer in a non-textual format before their first PR is merged. Seems to work well for a small project.
Only if you have maintainers everywhere. I live in a small city in the middle of the US - how far is it to a maintainer? 4 hours to Kansas City, or fly to San Francisco? Either way the burden seems far too high.
Isn't the burden being that high the point? It keeps a small team who all know each other working on it, and everyone who does get on the team has some high investment in the project.
Indeed, a request for a short video call filters out most of the people who are looking to pad their resume with LLM-automated contributions, while adding an extra layer of welcome to genuine newbies who want to join the community.
I'm not sure if AI can do those today, but they probably can in the near future. (probably we will be able to see obvious "that can't be human" for a while longer)