Great comments from Sonja, and since Planet SUSE is one of the ways to communicate, I'll offer thoughts here...

Do we need only one distribution, or maybe three trees I can see the benefit in multiple trees, I thought I'd blogged about this before, but can't find it, so probably not. I would see there being two permanent trees:

• Development
  This is essentially UNSTABLE, and where the bleeding edge work happens. In CVS terms, think of it as HEAD. Anything goes here, within the framework of agreement by the maintainers of the various components.
• Release
  This is as STABLE as we can get it, it's essentially whatever the last release was plus updates (of course there's also the support for previous releases, but that's a lower priority). No API/ABI changes allowed here, same policy applies as current SUSE update policy basically.

Then, there'd be a third tree that would come in as and when required:

• Beta
  You guessed it. This is the roughly equivalent to the current beta programme, represents a fork from Development, exists for the beta test period, and then becomes the next iteration of Release

As for who can contribute I've said before that there are some people (myself, Pascal, Richard B, the PackMan crew for example) who are respected and trusted in the community who would be an obvious first tier of community-based package maintainers. Thoughts?