Github Automaintainer

One thing I've always had trouble with is the long tail of Open Source projects. For the larger, more popular projects there's it's usually fine; there's an established community and some particularly organised and motivated maintainer has usually stepped forward. But for smaller ones the effort of maintaining a project seems disproportionately high compared to the effort of making the project in the first place. Who wants to review pull requests or build a community for some 50-line thing you threw together one time?

I think a great way to solve this would be some kind of Github Automaintainer. You would authorise it to access your repository and it would read a special file configuring the rules by which it should maintain your project. Rules would look like:

• Anyone who has a pull request merged becomes a contributor.
• A pull request can be approved by 2 or more contributors.
• A contributor who hasn't contributed (by committing or approving) in the last 6 months is removed

Though obviously those numbers and even the rules themselves would be customisable.

I think a lot of smaller projects could get away with nothing but that kind of minimal rule-based organisation, and it would be easier for everyone. Maintainers wouldn't have to do much work to maintain the project, and the explicit rules would make it easy to understand how to become a contributor to the project and how commits are approved.

And who doesn't like knowing their project is managed by a robot?