Hello everyone!
My name is Jan Dvorak, also known as Storyteller or StorytellerCZ in the FOSS circles. I’ve graduated from RIT in 2014 (NMID) and in 2016 (IST). During my masters program I have gotten involved with MeteorJS and now years later I’m one of the core developers for it. I think it is really awesome framework for web apps to get things done.
I hope that going forward RIT and Meteor will have some collaboration, so I wanted to go ahead and be available here as a resource for you all.
Hello! nice to meet you.
Also, I’m a Colemak guy, but its nice to meet a Dvorak 
Whats it like being a core developer for a major FOSS project? I’ve thought about creating a FOSS community to keep an Open Source project alive but am not sure what that will do to my schedule given that I’m also still in school, and doing random projects and freelance gigs on the side.
It changes your perspective about the project a lot as you have to start caring about the entirety of the project, especially for such a big one like Meteor. In one way it is great because you can have a great impact on the project, but you have also to be careful not to overdo it to just suit what you want and be careful of your time. I have cough myself spending too much time coding on the project while not advancing other stuff that is important, personal and project wise.
As for creating a community around the project you mentioned, that is not something you can do. Community emerges out of people using it. You can only facilitate it by creating venues for the community to interact and get involved. If you are on GitHub for starters you can utilize GitHub Discussions on the project. If you have other active contributors you might want to choose some of them to become maintainers which will reduce the time you need to spend on maintaining the product. Since you are also freelancing you can then put your contact info in the product if people want to get paid support from you (pretty good thing I think).
Ah ok, this might not work too well then since its a project that was created/maintained by a company/startup but they seem to have shifted resources away from it to their other offerings. I guess overall that’s a good thing for my schedule lol.
also, do you have a favorite funding model for open source projects that you think will or should be particularly successful/more widespread? every time I’ve seen this discussion come up I end up learning new things and it seems like a cool question to get to know people and further the conversation
Well, don’t give up yet. If there are people using it you can turn things around. This is the story of CodeIgniter and Meteor, so you need to make an assessment. It will also depend if you can take over the existing repository or will have to fork.
As for funding that is something that I’m still struggling with. So far the most successful I saw is that there is a great product associated with the FOSS project. For individuals GitHub Sponsorship is looking good, but it isn’t easy.