> how are you supposed to actually understand what's going on?

By talking with developers of the project! All it takes is a few conversations to get an idea about the why/what/when/ about a project and understand enough of its internals to be able to articulate those same things to others.

Numerous other things can be done by people who don't write the actual code:

* Writing a great "Getting Started" guide

* Writing great conceptual documentation

* Acting as a community moderator and squashing vitriol

* Acting as a contact for companies needing work done on the project

* Keeping things like Github Issues fully tagged, organized, and traced back to from Pull Requests

That's just off the top of my head. There are likely many more things that an OSS project would value which someone who isn't writing code can do.

You can just hang out on an IRC channel for a project for weeks and get a lot of ideas about how things work. Also, if we pitch documentation bounties the same way we do bug bounties, we'd probably have a lot better documentation for software projects. And if your project moves so fast documentation falls behind often, perhaps your project needs to redefine its core features enough or at least mark what is experimental and shouldn't be relied upon too much for production code. None of this stuff really needs someone to be anything more than familiar with general coding concepts. Heck, just hire some random person out of a coding academy and they can document as a way to learn the internals of a project for a while - not a lot of harm can be done to a codebase by documenting it, right?

I would look at it sort of like a CTO/CEO relationship, but with a somewhat inverted power dynamic (if there is one at all). You have someone reliable who you can ask when a technical question comes up (so that you can determine whether someone else in the community is trying to tech-bullshit you), but you have a better grasp on how to deal with the human aspects of the community.

That said, I'm not sure where you're going to find these people. Good managers are probably getting good manager jobs, and likely don't have the time to hand-hold another community. Combine that with the fact that their power mandate will be less clear in a community, and I doubt you'll get many people that want to get involved in this way.

There's a lot that people can do without knowing how to code. QA and support are two tasks that are often horribly understaffed in OSS, and in larger projects, you don't want developers doing these tasks because other people can do them equally effective and developer time is better spent fixing things.