There have been attempts to organize this, including one I know off the top of my head[1].<p>There are two problems. One is that an orderly transfer of control requires a certain amount of planning and coordination, which are precisely the resources that aren't available when a maintainer has left (or is on the way out). The other is that people tend to become maintainers of other peoples' projects by climbing the open source 'career ladder' from user to minor contributor to major contributor; projects are stable when they have enough contributors that the most-productive non-maintainer can be promoted to maintainer status when the original author leaves.<p>GitHub helps by making it easy and obvious to fork something and eventually have your repo promoted to be the 'official' one, but as with many problems in open source, finding a particular, specific person who actually does that is the hard part.<p>[1]<a href="http://thechangelog.com/post/1986814704/stillmaintained" rel="nofollow">http://thechangelog.com/post/1986814704/stillmaintained</a>