The solution to many of these questions might be for the "dead-man's switch" discussed in the article to require interacting with an email account with a public/private key system.
E.g., if someone doesn't log in to an email account after, say, a year, it starts auto-replying with that information suggesting the person might have died or is otherwise incapacitated, setting into motion a process to verify what happened (like just being burnt out on open source development). It could also trigger a similar email to the inheritors of the project.
E.g., if someone doesn't log in to an email account after, say, a year, it starts auto-replying with that information suggesting the person might have died or is otherwise incapacitated, setting into motion a process to verify what happened (like just being burnt out on open source development). It could also trigger a similar email to the inheritors of the project.