Right now, I see "Wanted: UX designer" but that doesn't tell me if they just need a menu bar, or an entire front-end for a mail client
As proof, GitPals posted[0] their own project on GitPals. The sole comment mentions that they're looking for help auditing their JWT implementation. This is a sufficiently small and well-scoped task, and so I did[1]! I admittedly opened GitPals with no expectation of contributing, but the ask was small enough that it seemed reasonable.
My point in writing all that is that soon as you take an idea like this and say “and if we only add feature X we could have a bartering economy” my mind immediately goes to the fact that a bartering economy has a ton of drawbacks which is why we no longer use them anywhere. I see people romanticizing it as if it’s much better than our current system, but accounting with it is much harder, pricing is nearly impossible, and there are few penalties for non-payment since a transaction might take a really long time to get settled (at least as long as it takes to complete the longest task). Basically these kinds of projects seem to work only so long as they stay at a manageable size while also keeping an enthusiastic community involved. If you grow, you need economy which leads to all the stuff I outlined above.