I just want to focus on the provenance question, but, really, you can ignore me. I'm not trying to win an argument here, just leave some ideas in the atmosphere.
I see several speculative options here. 1) A contribution might live 'outside' for some period of time. When the project decide to assimilate it, the contributor balls it up and attaches it to a JIRA, or files an SGA. 2) Committers create branches in svn and apply interesting patches to them. Lots more zoo-keeping. 3) When/if git goes fully-live at Apache, infra and the board allow us to allow non-committers (with iclas) to contribute to non-trunk branches. 4) The moral equivalent of a github 'pull' request is interpreted as sufficient 'intent to contribute'. 5) (This is Greg Stein's idea, I think:) We lower the committer bar a lot, but make a strong distinction between the trunk and other branches. I'm not sure why we would want to be the first community to try this trick.
