One thing you could try to solve is coordinated revival of abandoned projects - i.e. extending your model to support unsolicited takeover of projects, in the case of a maintainer's having walked away.

For example, I use a javascript library that's best in class for what it does, and yet hasn't had any real commits from its maintainer since 2016. There are 50 pull requests open, some of which fix significant bugs, or add good new features. There are literally 2000 forks of the library, some of which are published on npm but are themselves unmaintained, and almost none of which link back to the actual fork's code from npm. It's a mess, and I bet it's a situation repeated hundreds of times over.

If you were to figure out a workflow by which a maintenance team could form on your platform, and then a) the existing maintainer is pinged to request that they add the team, falling back to b) making it easy for the new team to fork and adopt existing pull requests while supporting them through initial team-forming by laying out a workflow for assigning needed-roles, then I think you'd have a valuable platform.

The key thing is ensuring there's a large enough team to start, so that yet another fork doesn't die on the vine, so maybe think about a(n old) reddit link type interface where people can link to, vote on, and volunteer for projects, with no work needed until there's critical mass and the platform moves the project forward.

Hmm, that's an interesting idea, thanks. Given that finding one maintainer is already hard, though, I think finding a team would be almost impossible...

With the voting mechanism, you wouldn't necessarily need to form a team all at once. Maybe it takes 6 months for enough people to click the "I'd participate" button on a popular project. Granted, half of them might drop out when the project graduates...but if you can try to stake the ground of "the place to suggest and coordinate forks" then at least people who were interested might find it over time.

Oh hmm, I see how you mean, that's interesting... I'll think about that, thanks!

> Given the high level of trust users and project owners are putting in us, we need our maintainers to already have demonstrated their trustworthiness in the community. As such, we'd like to see any popular project you are an owner/maintainer of, as it would make it easier for us to accept you.

I certainly understand the rationale but doesn't this narrow down the universe of possible maintainers while putting even more load on existing maintainers by expecting them to take on more work?

> kitchen and egg problem

Hadn't heard that malapropism before.

Oof, must have been hungry when I wrote that.