I believe something like the model followed by Apache Software Foundation works well in favor of continuity of a project. They have an overseeing committee that

I believe something like the model followed by Apache Software Foundation works well in favor of continuity of a project. They have an overseeing committee that one can request to add new committers or even transfer ownership of project if the existing committers are no longer maintaining the project. But ASF does come with a lot of bureaucracy for creating a new project. GitHub makes creating new projects very simple but it also makes disapperance of ownership very likely. If there was a way to request GitHub to transfer ownership of a popular but unmaintained project to someone else, a lot of time and effort spent in creating new forks and new project resources could be avoided.