Let's pause and summarize: our culture wants heroes and this leads us to expect maintainers to be superhackers and superactive hotlines. This is the HOT mindset of maintenance, where the maintainer is the Headmaster Of Tweaks and soon becomes the Headmaster Of Troubles.
To resist this HOT mindset, let's redefine maintenance as ACDC: Asynchronous Collective Distributed Care:
- Asynchronous because time management is a private matter and we are all volunteers.
- Collective because, well, no man is an island.
- Distributed: the more power to the "edges", the more resilient the project is.
- Care because this is all about care: with each other as users or as contributors, with the project's infrastructure (servers, websites, bug trackers, etc.) and care about having a useful product.