I currently have commit rights and I'm working the process right now to add additional help though the process takes a certain amount of time. Expect an announcement on Wednesday.
Code development at the ASF should be done in the open and not in a private branch that unveiled to the community (has happened in the past) as that basically prevents anyone else from influencing the work while in process. Code should go into the SVN as it is developed so there can be feedback, etc. Which someones means there will be code that was bad, buggy, undesirable, etc, but that always can be undone. The essential aspect that a committer is to ensure is that the code is either his own independent work or there is a clear record of an intent to contribute by the original author (typically in a JIRA bug report or an email on a archived mailing list). It is not a wonderful thing to break a build etc, but that is not a huge thing in the big picture. I'm going to try to commit some of the JIRA issues that were recently commented upon.
