I feel that the way that GitHub and others do social coding is a bit backwards in regards to this article. Issues shouldn't implicitly be owned by the owner of the repo but by the reporter. The reporter cares about the problem. The issue tracker should be a way to find others who care about the same problem. If the repo owner doesn't care they should feel no obligation. But the way the issue trackers are structured those issues implicitly becomes the repo maintainers problem.
Also, there should be more ways to "praise" a project.
I don't have a "good" solution in mind but perhaps some partial solutions off the top of my head:
Keep issues separate from the repos but allow tagging the repos in the ticket. Would allow multiple projects to get associated with one ticket. Community owned issues, a bit like stack overflow.
GitHub projects are structured from the url to give the idea of total ownership by the the author of all the tabs of the project. So the issue tracker looks like it is "owned" by the author. Perhaps the author could choose to disown the tracker related to the project in some way. And then they could choose to own individual issues. Opt in instead of opt out and close.
>Also, there should be more ways to "praise" a project.
Maybe github should implement a "feedback" tab where people can post their experiences of using the project. Perhaps some of those experiences would be negative too, but it would also allow people to give you neutral or positive feedback on what they like about the project, how they are using it, and what they have achieved with it.
Also, there should be more ways to "praise" a project.