I wrote some comments, github marks them as Pending, which I’m actually confused about. Did I start a review and not finish that? Do others see my comments?
I think that RIOT-OS has the cross-review problem that many other entities suffer from. (Including the IETF). The people most qualified to do the review are either too busy, or are already involved in the patch. Other people, upon reading the patch might be “meh”, and do not know/understand/care about some subtlety in the design. It may require some leaps of faith.
I think that many of the concerns about how people become maintainers are wrapped up in the above anxiety: how to do we delegate the right amount of authority to maintainers to merge things, while also enabling sensible review, and some amount of “oh, wait, that patch also changed X?”. In the IETF, we suffer from Organization Ossificiation, where every single conflict results in a new rule/policy such that we get consistent results. So please don’t go there. I keep looking for papers that talk about how organizations ossify, and found this article: Organisational Ossification and Management Theory | The Libertarian Ideal {on a libertarian site? ick}. It does talk about Situtational Leadership Model, aka Situational leadership theory - Wikipedia and many still call them the Hersey-Blanchard charts.
I think that there are no real magic bullets here: except, well. Beer. That is building social trust among contributors, maintainers, etc. The summit is critical for this, but maybe we need more time.