Help Find Co-Maintainer(s)

Privatemsg has 16,806 sites currently reported as using it, over 250 open issues and is seeking one or possibly more co-maintainers according to the project page. Despite having so many sites using it there are 77 open bugs. The project page may be out of date, but looking at activity in contrib on d.o it occurred to me that we don't really have a good process for bringing on co-maintainers. Not that there isn't a process to make it happen, but it is all very mechanical.

Ultimately there are always going to be many more users than developers in any successful project. That being said, for a popular module like this, a module maintainer should be able to choose. I've tried to outline #2185511: Highlight User Contributions & What They Can Do Next in Issue Queue how to encourage people to start participating in projects. A project like this one that is actively Seeking co-maintainer(s), should have some way to more actively remind folks in the issue queue that help is being requested.

Now it could be just dealing with the issue queue or building up enough knowledge about the module that they can effectively test a number of outstanding patches. Maybe it's working on the D8 version. Maybe something like documentation or tests. In an actively used module there is always going to be something.

Having a goal can also help. I've proposed #2186377: Highlight projects that follow Best Practices but I'm really not sure what can arbitrarily be evaluated.

I started off by looking incentives for getting people involved in the issue queue and thought both of these might help - #2138397: Highlight Flattr, Paypal or Whatever Opportunities on Issue Pages & #2177459: Highlight Supporting Organizations in the Issue Queue

Having new ways to alert people in the Drupal community how they might engage is useful. http://www.comaintainer.com was set up to try to gather together information about modules like this one that were looking for support maintaining the code base.

I'm starting this issue in the hopes of having a discussion with this community about what would help more people step up and take on the responsibility of helping to maintain this module.