For the longest time, Google’s new Fuchsia operating system remained a bit of a mystery — with little information in terms of the company’s plans for it, even as the team behind it brought the code to GitHub under a standard open-source license. These days, we know that it’s Google’s first attempt at developing a completely new kernel and general purpose operating system that promises to be more than just an experiment (or a retention project to keep senior engineers from jumping ship). For the most part, though, Google has remained pretty mum about the subject.

It seems like Google is ready to start talking about Fuchsia a bit more now. The company today announced that it is expanding the Fuchsia open-source community and opening it up to contributions from the public. Typically, companies start opening up their open-source projects to outside contributors once they feel they have achieved a stable foundation that others can build on.

“Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia ‘s open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project,” the team writes. “We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.”

It’s been four years, and we still don’t really know what Google intends to do with this OS.

It’s been over four years since we first found out that Google is developing a new operating system called Fuchsia. It’s unique because it’s not based on a Linux kernel; instead, it uses a microkernel called Zircon. It’s also unique because, despite being developed “in the open” on publicly browsable repositories, nobody really understands what the OS is for, and Google executives have been remarkably coy about it all.

Today, that mix of trends continues as the company announces that it’s opening up a little more by asking for more public contributors from outside its organization. Google says it has “created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on.”

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a dive into the code and documentation Google has made available, though there are some early UI examples. Google’s post today emphasizes that “Fuchsia is not ready for general product development or as a development target,” but it’s likely that the announcement will spur another round of analysis.