Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Highlight

If maintainers were to defer to their community, how could they assess overall opinion, given the lack of clear membership boundaries? Countries have citizenships and constituencies, but open source projects are open to anyone. If someone made a one-time contribution to Opal, does that make them a “contributor” in the same sense as a lead maintainer? How do we know if the developers opposing or favoring action represent a minority voice, if we don’t know the actual population of the community?