Most projects and organisations are one key person away from crisis.

A lead maintainer burns out. A founder gets hit by a bus. Your only person who knows the passwords suddenly becomes incapacitated. The technical lead gets hired away. Life happens, and when it does, projects collapse because we've built them around individuals rather than systems.

We call this the 'bus factor' - a polite term for an uncomfortable reality.

This is a collection of practical resources for building resilience into projects and organizations. Not theoretical best practices, but battle-tested tools created by people who have actually navigated these transitions.

The resources here apply whether you're leading an open source project, running a nonprofit, managing a small business, or building any kind of organisation that depends on key people.

I'm Ruth Cheesley, project lead for Mautic. Next year I'm taking a three-month sabbatical in the Spanish mountains to get ordained as a Buddhist. I'll be completely off-grid.

Preparing for that has forced me to confront every single point of failure in the project. Who has access to what? How do decisions get made without me? What happens if I don't come back? (Fully intending to return, but you never know!)

These aren't comfortable questions, but they're essential ones. And I realised that most of us are avoiding them until it's too late.

Free resources built collaboratively with maintainers, leaders, and people who have lived through difficult transitions:

• Frameworks for auditing your bus factor vulnerabilities
• Checklists for legacy planning and emergency access
• Templates for succession planning and governance handoffs
• Scenario exercises for practicing crisis response
• Real stories of what worked and what didn't

These resources started at GitHub Universe 2025 Community Day and continue to evolve through community contributions.

Courses (coming soon) will provide step-by-step implementation guides for specific contexts - open source projects, nonprofits, small businesses, community organizations. The free resources give you the frameworks; the courses walk you through applying them to your situation.

If you've been through a difficult transition, your experience matters. The resources here get better when more people share what they've learned.

See individual repositories for contribution guidelines.

Begin with resilience-resources - the foundational toolkit for building resilient organizations.

We don't have to build projects that collapse when individuals leave. We can do better.