Your "answer" sounds like it has value, but I'm not sure your "question" is well framed. I would expect actively maintained repos to have a preferred channel f

Your "answer" sounds like it has value, but I'm not sure your "question" is well framed. I would expect actively maintained repos to have a preferred channel for seeking help and/or discussing changes (ticket system, mailing list, gitter chat, IRC, etc). I think you'd do best to use that channel even if your "expert" is not there. If the expert isn't making themselves available there's probably a reason. For example if people contact me privately about my FOSS projects I almost always direct them to use the preferred channel. Perhaps it's still useful to identify who those people are, even if you don't contact them (e.g. to read their commits, their blog, etc.) On the other hand, if we're talking about forensic work on an inactive repo perhaps it makes sense to understand "who is who". Another use-case would be understanding who-is-who on a repo you have no intention of working on (think, investigating some algorithm details in Chromium).