The rise of few-maintainer projects

Instead of work being distributed across community members, we’re seeing a shift toward casual contributors: developers who make occasional, one-off contributions to a project but otherwise consider themselves to be passive users. Instead of a community of active contributors, open source often looks more like a few developers playing air traffic controller to thousands of users who are lightly involved. Tarr cited a popular 2013 blog post by developer Felix Geisendörfer, which recommends “the pull request hack” as a way to reduce the burden of single maintainership: “Whenever somebody sends you a pull request, give them commit access to your project.”

Source: increment.com