This is a more complicated feature. Maintainers are considered people who "speak for the project" and are designated through a project's governance model. Drift through PRs isn't a correct method to do this.

Instead, one idea was to ping projects if a maintainer.yaml hasn't been updated in six months (via an issue) asking "is this still up to date? Also (if applicable) we see these $x people have been contributing heavily over the last six months and these $y people haven't touched anything in GitHub in the last six months"

@jeefy, the drift detector has been refactored and introduced a health-check-and-report feature as suggested.

The scheduled workflow will check the maintainers.yml and whether it has not been edited for the last 6 months.

If yes, we will create an issue and tag the first 3 owners or the top 3 contributors of the Org.

An example of the Issue that will be created:

Maintainer List Health Check — kubernetes

Hi X 👋

maintainers.yaml has not been updated in 194 days (threshold: 180 days).
Please confirm the list below still reflects your project's governance model.

🕒 Checked: 2026-04-29 08:00 UTC
📅 Activity window: last 6 months

Current Maintainers — Activity

Active Contributors Not Yet in Maintainer List

These contributors have been active across project repos in the last 6 months but do not appear in maintainers.yaml. Consider whether any should be nominated per your governance process.

No changes are required automatically. Please update maintainers.yaml if this no longer reflects your governance, or close this issue to confirm it is still accurate. This issue was opened by cncf/automation maintainer health-check tooling.