Providing fair credit and growth opportunities for contributors

Why should I or others contribute work that is not immediately helpful for ourselves?
How do I and other members of my community get credit for this work?
How can I share the load of managing this software project?

Know the different types of credit work on a software projects can bring
Assess the proportion of credit that is appropriate for the maintainers and for the other contributors of your project
Understand growth strategies for members of your community, to increase the number of project maintainers, as well as contributors.

The question of credit

Credit is important as time spend on community and software is time not spent on science (unless working on the part of the software that produces the science).
Since credit for software contributions is often less visible, people think they are less acknowledged.
Many ways of credit: Perceived competence, Known as maintainer of …, Create relations/Work in a great team, Feel useful
Additionally, software work is increasingly acknowleged in science (‘product’/’deliverables’ instead of ‘publications’).

To give proper credit is an important motivation for contributions to software, however the type of credit can be different
contributors/developers/maintainers can be used to give badges to people
however, a lot of motivation simply comes from working in a good team and needing the software (Lakhani et al)

As a maintainer you need help when the project grows, a number of long-time contributors want recognition for what they have done … solve both problems by making them maintainers
Gradual growth is important
Having clear policies for how to award badges is important