Finding a new project owner or new maintainers/co-maintainers

Last updated on
24 July 2022

If you are maintaining a project and you would like to collaborate with other members of the community, you could team up with maintainers/co-maintainers. If, for some reason, you are not able to maintain the project any longer, you could find a new project owner to whom transfer the whole project.

Strategies for finding new maintainers/co-maintainers

  • Set the Maintenance status project field to Seeking new maintainer. Edit the Development status field too, if necessary.
  • Open an issue in the Drupal.org project ownership issue queue with the title set to Seeking new maintainer for [Project Name]. Provide a link to your project, and perhaps some words of explanation about your motivation and the situation of the project. Be sure to include the conditions under which you agree to add a new co-maintainer or maintainer.
  • Post an announcement on the project page itself that you are looking for a new maintainer/co-maintainer. Include a link to the issue you just created.
  • Create an issue in your project queue, announcing that you are looking for a new maintainer/co-maintainer.
  • Contact people who consistently post issues or patches for your project in the queue and use their contact tab to ask if they are interested in maintaining the project.
  • Use the Open Ownership Pledge tag in some of the issues in your project's issue queue that you would like to see solved first by a potential new owner.

Adding new maintainers/co-maintainers

If you find users who can be added as new maintainers or co-maintainers, you can grant them the maintainer status. If you want to transfer the project ownership to someone else, or if you don't have the permission to add maintainers/co-maintainers and the current project owner cannot be reached, you can open an issue in the Drupal.org project ownership issue queue.

Transferring project ownership

If you want to transfer the ownership of a project you own to a specific community member or organization, open an issue in the Drupal.org project ownership issue queue using Transfer ownership of [Project Name] to [Username] as title. In the issue, state whether the user account is an organization/shared account or an individual account and whether the new owner intent is continuing to develop code or documentation for that project.

Giving up a project

If you are no longer capable of maintaining a project, and you have not found a new project owner, maintainer, or co-maintainer:

  1. Set the project status to unmaintained; add a note to the project page that says the project needs a new maintainer.
  2. Create an issue in your project's issue queue to seek new maintainers. (See the sections above.)
  3. Open an issue in the Drupal.org project ownership issue queue and use Abandoning [Project Name] as title.

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