I believe only people with write access to the repository can add labels :(. (I can't edit labels on #54, for example.)

Indeed, we could make a triage team that's fairly large and includes people from the organizations that are likely to file issues, but we'd need different instructions for that.

Oh that's annoying. I wish we could grant label access to anyone (or to a much broader group). Or maybe we could put a place for initial labels in the issue template and have some sort of automation do it?

A combination of https://docs.github.com/en/communities/using-templates-to-encourage-useful-issues-and-pull-requests/syntax-for-issue-forms and a bot might be a way to go. Perhaps a future version of that feature will have a way to take the output of part of the form and use it to set labels and assignees and such.

see #27 re some bot