I'm currently the sole maintainer of an API that a friend and I have written. It is currently written in Java, and is designed to make a lot of the low level interfaces high-level, to help ease the learning process of beginners learning Java. It's sole application is in my school, where other students who have never programmed before use it, to use in basic projects. For example:import arctic.lights.dev.FileIO;public class getLettersInFile {    String[] fileLines = FileIO.getAllLinesInFile(path/to/file.txt);}It's well documented, but we're looking to seriously expand it, and make it available to other beginner developers and schools.Currently, since it's not very active, and is only used within our school, updating and maintaining the project is easy, and not very troublesome. However, since we are expanding it, and making it available to other schools.With the school year coming up, my friend and I are becoming increasingly nervous about expanding, and the lack of available time to successfully maintain the project. Currently, the project is not publicly available, but we're looking to hosting it and getting a license for it. If we do make it available, our main concern is creating a backlog of requests and issues among places. With courses that start in September, we're predicting that the biggest spike in activity is going to be at that time, especially if bugs are found. Pull requests likely won't be very popular - the end users of the API don't really know much about programming...My friend and I have a couple questions:Should we be looking for an extra maintainer to alleviate a predicted backlog? As students, is it appropriate to be looking for an extra maintainer?If we do end up looking for an extra maintainer, what should we be looking for in a potential maintainer? This maintainer won't likely come from our school (my friend and I are the most competent developers known), so we want to make sure that we find someone that won't try to take over the project, as it's also a learning experience for us.
Is it appropriate for me to have multiple project maintainers in this project?
project management;marketing;software development
First of all, you're worrying about an assumed problem. You two may run out of time, get a backlog of issues ... or not. So it might not even happen that you run into problems.You also may simply do no maintaining at all. Nobody is forcing you or your friend. Or you could do as much as you can manage. Some people might complain if their issue isn't resolved, but in no way you can be forced to act upon it. Some open source is released without giving users a feedback-channel at all (that was more common in the past, now with internet feedback is more easy to achieve and more accepted). A possible user for such unmaintained software can use the software as it is, (s)he can leave it be if the issues are too big for you or (s)he could change the software according to own needs (the last option is possible because the software is open-source, a great thing).For your software in question you two could decide to always adapt the software for the needs of your own school, but ignore external requests. Again some external user has the above mentioned options.Or you two could do as much maintaining, as you can and want. Nobody can force you for more. In this case it may be helpful to communicate that you can only afford so much time for maintaining. Make a note on the website and pick issues you want to work on and issues you not want to work on and communicate that.In my experience many projects don't get much attention, especially at first. It may depend on the channels though, in which it is advertised. Simply putting it on github doesn't create much attention, so you get not much users (and not too much maintenance work). In your case teachers in computer science might tell teachers of other schools about the project and create attention this way. Maybe you want to control growth of the project and involve at first only a few other schools, so that the maintenance effort is manageable. After that involve even more schools and so on.