Need at least one individual to put in the effort to make it happen: encouraging the community to either attend to crucial issues [1] or delay them or find workarounds; proposing the Release Plan; being the Release Manager; attempting to motivate the community.
Need more developers to be involved, not just during the final testing phase, but also in the lead-up preparation phase. Don't expect the few active committers to do it. Those people have their own time constraints too. [1] http://forrest.apache.org/procedures/release/How_to_release.html#prep -David
