One thing I'd suggest is finding people to mentor new contributors and sort of take a bit of joint ownership of the patch until it's at the point where it's very likely to be merged.
After one experience like this most people would be ready to submit patches on their own...
I think it would be cool to have the community provide this sort of "training wheels" to help people get past all of the roadblocks and not feel relegated to dealing with bug report paperwork (as valuable as that is)...
The conundrum with projects like Python is that the people talented enough to submit useful patches are usually not the ones who have the time to do so.
After one experience like this most people would be ready to submit patches on their own...
I think it would be cool to have the community provide this sort of "training wheels" to help people get past all of the roadblocks and not feel relegated to dealing with bug report paperwork (as valuable as that is)...
The conundrum with projects like Python is that the people talented enough to submit useful patches are usually not the ones who have the time to do so.