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A while ago I started an OSS maintainer community for exactly this purpose, I saw software that was in use, people wanted to contribute, the users were very act

A while ago I started an OSS maintainer community for exactly this purpose, I saw software that was in use, people wanted to contribute, the users were very active, but the developer had abandoned it, creating a hole. We all know how much more difficult it is to create a fork that will be discoverable over the original rather than just merge a few PRs. I would like to ask anyone who currently has a project they don't want to maintain to spend the minute to add the project to Code Shelter: https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/ This way, interested people can easily pick up maintenance and at least merge a few PRs/triage a few issues. Also, if you have some spare time or you see a project you'd like to help out with, please join Code Shelter as a maintainer: https://www.codeshelter.co/membership/ https://www.codeshelter.co/membership/ There's no reason to have abandoned projects nowadays, it locks them in a state of "I don't want anyone improving this" rather than "I don't have time to improve it, but feel free to if you want".

aflag 7y ago
This is awesome! Have you tried to get in contact with GitHub? It'd be nice if they embraced the project. Maybe adding a new button or tab with a shelter link to the project (they already have a forks view).
- StavrosK 7y ago
  We haven't, I'd like to get some more traction (and build a welcoming community) first before expanding to anything else.
bxparks 7y ago
This is a great idea, thank you for creating it. Could I suggest 2 things? 1) Can you group the projects according to the language or framework (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Node, Arduino, C++, Java, etc). 2) Can you carve out a separate section for projects that currently have no maintainers? I had to scroll through the entire list to see if there was something that I could help with. (I'm on my phone, so if these sections already exist on desktop, I didn't see them.)
- StavrosK 7y ago
  These are great ideas, thank you! I will file the issues now (they'll be at https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/codeshelter-web/issues https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/codeshelter-web/issues if you want to track them).
grogenaut 7y ago
Even if you don't get a maintainer for a project, just providing ownership transfer and holding of no longer maintained projects is probably useful. Getting the owner to turn over the keys when they update the readme might be easier than 10 years later.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Yeah, this is one of the reasons I wanted this. The owners have nothing to lose (they aren't maintaining the projects anyway), the maintainers have nothing to lose (there's no time requirement), and at some point you might come across a project that you want to use but that has been abandoned, and you can just click "join" and become its maintainer.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    Not that I have massively successful projects but one thing I would love is to just hand over keys to someone I can trust to vet the person the keys are handed to. I'd be fine with "verired no malware, no spam, no adware." as a handoff.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      That's what Code Shelter does (provided you trust us to vet people, I guess).
akavel 7y ago
I added one of my projects (https://github.com/akavel/rsrc https://github.com/akavel/rsrc) some time ago, when codeshelter was announced for the first time; it has a "maintainer" listed; but noone seemed to either contact me or do anything with the repo, ever. It feels weird to me. I can understand that there's no requirement for them to do something; but it still feels weird as it is now — someone seems to claim to (want to?) be a contributor, but didn't seem to even try and reach out to me. Thinking out loud, maybe there could be some form, where if a candidate maintainer clicks the button to "join a project" (or whatever), they'd have to compose some message that would be sent to the owner, to at least break some first ice and initiate some contact? I don't know what's going on with the person. If there was an easy way, I would be happy to reach out to them and ask them, like, "hey, howdy'a doing?" Also, it would be nice if I was sent an email with a notification when someone "claims" my project, and with a chance to connect with them. Maybe you could try and start contacting people to see how is this working, and if not, to try and dig down on the underlying reasons? maybe this could lead to some now ideas for improvements and helping people work together?
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! This was probably later than when you added the project, but we added a "note to maintainers" feature: https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/note-to-maintainers https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/note-to-maintainers It's basically a text file where you describe how you want future maintainers to handle the project, give instructions, caveats, etc (whatever you want, basically). I assume this specific maintainer situation happened because it's easy to click a button and be added to the project, so maybe the maintainer was planning to do something but didn't get around to it, or something similar. About the communication, you're right, we encourage maintainers and authors to join our chat server (https://codeshelter.zulipchat.com/ https://codeshelter.zulipchat.com/) so they can be in contact. Code Shelter was built with more of a long-term prospect in mind (obviously we can't guarantee that we'll find you a maintainer right away), maybe I should amend the copy to manage peoples' expectations, because I hear from a lot of people that they expected someone to pick up their project and were disappointed when it didn't happen.
  - 7y ago
alangpierce 7y ago
Seems like a great idea. One big worry with handing over ownership is fiascos like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392 where the author handed over ownership of an unmaintained project and the new owner released malicious code. I'd love to see a better systematic way to keep projects maintained in a way that the community can trust.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Yep, all maintainers are vetted specifically to avoid that. If Code Shelter existed back then, this (hopefully) wouldn't have happened.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
mncharity 7y ago
> how much more difficult it is to create a fork that will be discoverable over the original Part of the problem has been GitHub being unable to even show a fork graph for highly-forked projects. If that instrumentation was in better shape, one might imagine there would be more convergence. A related challenge is the lack of conventions or infrastructure around describing the intent of a fork. So instead of a transparent single page summary of a repo's forks, their original vision, actual activity, and relationships... individual consumers each do their own exploratory flailing around - "the github dance". In isolated repetition, as there's no convention/mechanism for sharing "I just spent an hour examining all these forks... here's what I learned, to spare you doing the same". Perhaps a minimalist alternative to a codeshelter, might be linking to some persistent discussion forum thread, to bless an coordination process, rather than one particular result. Though which forum has adequate properties... Perhaps use an Issue? Perhaps with some naming convention, like "Relationship to other forks"? "Related Work"? "Forks"? I've felt GitHub started well, was building out needed infrastructure... but then stalled out with much left undone. I'm just not sure codeshelter has the right shape. I've found people being briefly motivated to take something over, and then vanishing, to be a common case. So is "simply transfer ownership" the right model? Sometimes no one person wants to own it, but several would be willing to variously chip in, but the coordination barrier for that is currently unnecessarily high. But maybe someone has already created a "github fork network summarizer" service site, and I've just not yet heard of it? Perhaps the transition from a startup, to a "we're not pathological anymore, really truly" Microsoft, has changed the incentives around supporting parasitic services exploring and addressing niche needs? Could "a better github" information design exercises/services become a thing?

aflag 7y ago

This is awesome! Have you tried to get in contact with GitHub? It'd be nice if they embraced the project. Maybe adding a new button or tab with a shelter link to the project (they already have a forks view).

StavrosK 7y ago
We haven't, I'd like to get some more traction (and build a welcoming community) first before expanding to anything else.

bxparks 7y ago

This is a great idea, thank you for creating it. Could I suggest 2 things? 1) Can you group the projects according to the language or framework (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Node, Arduino, C++, Java, etc). 2) Can you carve out a separate section for projects that currently have no maintainers? I had to scroll through the entire list to see if there was something that I could help with. (I'm on my phone, so if these sections already exist on desktop, I didn't see them.)

StavrosK 7y ago
These are great ideas, thank you! I will file the issues now (they'll be at https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/codeshelter-web/issues https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/codeshelter-web/issues if you want to track them).

grogenaut 7y ago

Even if you don't get a maintainer for a project, just providing ownership transfer and holding of no longer maintained projects is probably useful. Getting the owner to turn over the keys when they update the readme might be easier than 10 years later.

StavrosK 7y ago
Yeah, this is one of the reasons I wanted this. The owners have nothing to lose (they aren't maintaining the projects anyway), the maintainers have nothing to lose (there's no time requirement), and at some point you might come across a project that you want to use but that has been abandoned, and you can just click "join" and become its maintainer.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  Not that I have massively successful projects but one thing I would love is to just hand over keys to someone I can trust to vet the person the keys are handed to. I'd be fine with "verired no malware, no spam, no adware." as a handoff.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    That's what Code Shelter does (provided you trust us to vet people, I guess).

akavel 7y ago

I added one of my projects (https://github.com/akavel/rsrc https://github.com/akavel/rsrc) some time ago, when codeshelter was announced for the first time; it has a "maintainer" listed; but noone seemed to either contact me or do anything with the repo, ever. It feels weird to me. I can understand that there's no requirement for them to do something; but it still feels weird as it is now — someone seems to claim to (want to?) be a contributor, but didn't seem to even try and reach out to me. Thinking out loud, maybe there could be some form, where if a candidate maintainer clicks the button to "join a project" (or whatever), they'd have to compose some message that would be sent to the owner, to at least break some first ice and initiate some contact? I don't know what's going on with the person. If there was an easy way, I would be happy to reach out to them and ask them, like, "hey, howdy'a doing?" Also, it would be nice if I was sent an email with a notification when someone "claims" my project, and with a chance to connect with them. Maybe you could try and start contacting people to see how is this working, and if not, to try and dig down on the underlying reasons? maybe this could lead to some now ideas for improvements and helping people work together?

StavrosK 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback! This was probably later than when you added the project, but we added a "note to maintainers" feature: https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/note-to-maintainers https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/note-to-maintainers It's basically a text file where you describe how you want future maintainers to handle the project, give instructions, caveats, etc (whatever you want, basically). I assume this specific maintainer situation happened because it's easy to click a button and be added to the project, so maybe the maintainer was planning to do something but didn't get around to it, or something similar. About the communication, you're right, we encourage maintainers and authors to join our chat server (https://codeshelter.zulipchat.com/ https://codeshelter.zulipchat.com/) so they can be in contact. Code Shelter was built with more of a long-term prospect in mind (obviously we can't guarantee that we'll find you a maintainer right away), maybe I should amend the copy to manage peoples' expectations, because I hear from a lot of people that they expected someone to pick up their project and were disappointed when it didn't happen.
- 7y ago

alangpierce 7y ago

Seems like a great idea. One big worry with handing over ownership is fiascos like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392 where the author handed over ownership of an unmaintained project and the new owner released malicious code. I'd love to see a better systematic way to keep projects maintained in a way that the community can trust.

StavrosK 7y ago
Yep, all maintainers are vetted specifically to avoid that. If Code Shelter existed back then, this (hopefully) wouldn't have happened.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

mncharity 7y ago

> how much more difficult it is to create a fork that will be discoverable over the original Part of the problem has been GitHub being unable to even show a fork graph for highly-forked projects. If that instrumentation was in better shape, one might imagine there would be more convergence. A related challenge is the lack of conventions or infrastructure around describing the intent of a fork. So instead of a transparent single page summary of a repo's forks, their original vision, actual activity, and relationships... individual consumers each do their own exploratory flailing around - "the github dance". In isolated repetition, as there's no convention/mechanism for sharing "I just spent an hour examining all these forks... here's what I learned, to spare you doing the same". Perhaps a minimalist alternative to a codeshelter, might be linking to some persistent discussion forum thread, to bless an coordination process, rather than one particular result. Though which forum has adequate properties... Perhaps use an Issue? Perhaps with some naming convention, like "Relationship to other forks"? "Related Work"? "Forks"? I've felt GitHub started well, was building out needed infrastructure... but then stalled out with much left undone. I'm just not sure codeshelter has the right shape. I've found people being briefly motivated to take something over, and then vanishing, to be a common case. So is "simply transfer ownership" the right model? Sometimes no one person wants to own it, but several would be willing to variously chip in, but the coordination barrier for that is currently unnecessarily high. But maybe someone has already created a "github fork network summarizer" service site, and I've just not yet heard of it? Perhaps the transition from a startup, to a "we're not pathological anymore, really truly" Microsoft, has changed the incentives around supporting parasitic services exploring and addressing niche needs? Could "a better github" information design exercises/services become a thing?