One of the first things I did in the new fork was cleaning up 150 stalles branches 🤷♂️ we can always get them upstream if we need but the fork is much cleaner.
I plan on improving contribution documentation but the more we change, the more annoying it might be to get things merged upstream as we have to cherry-pick things. But generally I plan for this fork to have as much help for contributors as possible.
Regarding issue boards, I enabled it so that the fork issues can reflect what developers work on and so we can asdign things, post bounties etc. And referencing issues from upstream is encouraged but by no means required.
But that is just my take. I hope many who join are vocal about tgeir opinion on how it should be run and we do great things together. Discussion openly happening on chain is in any case encouraged.