"People often talk about a software project's bus factor--the number of people on your project that need to get hit by a bus to leave you with no one familiar with your codebase. In the open source world, the disappearance of even one developer can herald the death of your project--if you don't prepare in advance.
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The most important thing you can do to bus-proof your project is to attract a strong developer community for it. Since open source developers usually first get involved in a project as users, you need to attract users for your project. This means that you need to create something that people want to use and then listen carefully to the user feedback. Today's user may turn out to be tomorrow's release manager..."
