Paper on "What Makes a Great Maintainer of Open Source Projects?"

[vfdev-5]

Interesting paper about the title:

• http://gustavopinto.org/lost+found/icse2021.pdf

Maintainers perform an unquestionably central work to the success and long-term sustainability of communities. The responsibilities of these contributors encompass a diverse set of responsibilities, which require different competencies. While
one can think of a maintainer as a solely technical developer responsible for keeping high-quality code, our results showed
that a great maintainer has to master a diverse set of skills. In fact, we found that Communication was considered the
most important attribute of a great maintainer with Quality Assurance being the second-ranked according to the %Essential
metric. This has been confirmed by a statistical analysis that involved pairwise comparisons between the ratings received
by the attributes. The other three attributes that compose the top-5 are not related to technical competencies (Community
Building, Empathy, and Vision). Therefore, it is clear that, although maintainers are usually highly technically-skilled
contributors, social and management skills are essential to excel in the position.