All Contributors is a project which helps us recognise all the types of contributions that build our open source communities and make them flourish. It defines a specification for acknowledging community members' work, whatever they contribute, as well as tools for easy management and presentation of this information. All Contributors is used by a wide range of communities, particularly those where key contributors are not well recognised by metrics more easily extracted from version control history.
Recently these communities noticed signs of poor health in All Contributors. When the website went offline, a group of users were catalysed in to action. Coordinated by Leah Wasser (pyOpenSci Executive Director & Founder, PSF Fellow) they committed to adopting the project and forming a new, sustainable team of maintainers.
With the context of All Contributors, I will tell a story of the decline and rise of an open source project. There will be a scattering of challenges maintainers face such as, burnout, technical debt, and lottery factor. However, it is also a hopeful story about how open source software can play critical roles, cultivate deep affection from its users, and, with community support, rise again.