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If GitHub had an "adoption center" for unwanted projects, that would be a step forward. At least give it to a maintainer who's interested.

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Maybe a maintainer can mark a repo as orphaned and others can bid to adopt it using their karma? Then the maintainer has a list of people to talk to about the future of the project... just helping make that transition easy would be nice.

A simple project setting that says "Advertise as orphan" would suffice. Then a banner would appear on the page saying "This project is looking for a maintainer!" and have something akin to an apply button where you might add a short comment about your interest.

With the "Login with GitHub" feature now available, this could even be a third-party service.

It might be an interesting satellite project. One that doesn't require maintainer consent; start with statistics and highlighting, mention which projects have changed their descriptions and readmes, show contributor lists.

(github network graphs would be helpful for this if their performance was remotely acceptable)

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