I've recently realized that I really love helping to re-energize projects that are suffering from maintainer distraction. Stuff like this: slack-go/slack#207

There are all these rules of thumb that i've started to discover for all the steps of:

1. creating the issue, and asking consent
2. researching potential co-maintainers
3. kickstarting tools that will help them work together effectively

I admit that I've started to wonder whether this could be automated a little bit. Not that I would want a bot to manage the relationship building -- that's best done by people, I feel -- but perhaps a tool could help that person research and find good candidates

Examples include:

• researching commit history / issue queues / long issue discussions (which sometimes point to heated convo)
• finding people with cool heads and a sense of empathy
• finding people active on github
• experience with langauge of repo
• github followers
• recent activity
• prioritizing under-represented candidates first (women, non-white, very mature high-schoolers)

Anyhow, obviously there are tons of heuristics to talk about, but I'm curious whether someone like yourself (or this community) might be interested in riffing on ideas :)

Anyhow, thanks very much for your consideration!

Related: isaacs/github#167

cc: @bkeepers (because i think this might be up your alley)