My expectation is that someone who is willing to attach their real name to something isn't willing to jeopardize their reputation and career over doing something malicious to a project.
Identity verification, similar to what Keybase supports, where people add a verification code to their social platforms might work here. Enough to verify to a certain degree whether someone is who they say they are. Maybe add a call to their employer to verify that they hold the role that they say they do also.
Hopefully that would solve that issue, but there's also the matter of someone being senior enough to be able to understand the direction of a project, set it, etc. Basically, you need to be able to trust every single one of the maintainers to have commit access on your project, with everything that entails.
For completely abandoned projects, it may not matter as much, but for projects that just need more eyes/hands, it's a larger consideration.
For completely abandoned projects, it may not matter as much, but for projects that just need more eyes/hands, it's a larger consideration.
Maybe add an agreement that if the community calls for a changing of the guard at some point that pending a review the maintainer will step down if the review process agrees.
I know HN is not terribly fond of crypto, but I think KYDcoin is a project that tackles this very usecase (specifically for crypto devs): https://review.kydcoin.io/
They review dev teams and attest they have seen personal information that matches the persons while the developers still can keep pseudonymous nicknames.
Comments
My expectation is that someone who is willing to attach their real name to something isn't willing to jeopardize their reputation and career over doing something malicious to a project.
Identity verification, similar to what Keybase supports, where people add a verification code to their social platforms might work here. Enough to verify to a certain degree whether someone is who they say they are. Maybe add a call to their employer to verify that they hold the role that they say they do also.
To me that would be enough skin in the game.
Hopefully that would solve that issue, but there's also the matter of someone being senior enough to be able to understand the direction of a project, set it, etc. Basically, you need to be able to trust every single one of the maintainers to have commit access on your project, with everything that entails.
For completely abandoned projects, it may not matter as much, but for projects that just need more eyes/hands, it's a larger consideration.
Maybe add an agreement that if the community calls for a changing of the guard at some point that pending a review the maintainer will step down if the review process agrees.
I know HN is not terribly fond of crypto, but I think KYDcoin is a project that tackles this very usecase (specifically for crypto devs): https://review.kydcoin.io/
They review dev teams and attest they have seen personal information that matches the persons while the developers still can keep pseudonymous nicknames.
Maybe an inspiration?