Add co-maintainers to Panopoly?

Panopoly is a great distribution! I've got a couple distributions based on it and its awesome to see other major distributions pick it up as well, like Open Atrium and Open Academy.

However, now that so many people are depending on it, the rate of development and how quickly patches are reviewed and integrated is starting to become more and more of a hinderance.

For example, new people trying Panopoly from Git will immediately hit issues like #2115807: Unpublished dev release from a couple hours ago - when there's been a patch to fix this RTBC'd for almost 2 months #2071133: Update URLs for backbone and underscore for Whitelist.

Also, there's lots of bug fixes from Open Atrium, for example, which Open Academy could use - so they have to go and add them to their make file. If you start a new distribution on Panopoly, you've got to walk through the issue queue, test them and put them in your make file too. If they were committed upstream, it would increase the ability of all these distributions to collaborate!

This isn't meant as a negative comment against @populist! He's an awesome developer and maintainer and does great work. However, I'm sure he's also very busy. :-)

What I'm trying to suggest is that maybe it's time that some of the other stakeholders - the people who now depend very heavily on Panopoly - were given the opportunity help with the maintanence of Panopoly!

I'm not necessarily suggesting myself - although, I'd love to do it and I already contribute lots of patches and help out with support as much as I can. ;-) But I'm also a relatively minor player.

Maybe a representative from each of the major distributions based on Panopoly makes sense? So long as they have a history of contributing quality patches, I'd personally be OK with it. From Open Atrium, that could be @hefox or @mpotter? From Open Academy, it could be @mrfelton?

Of course, this is not a complete list, but I've also seen great work come from @arshadcn and @Andrew_Mallis among others who aren't connected to a major distribution.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that Panopoly is a success! The idea of a distribution to build distributions clearly worked. So, how do we take that to the next level? There is this community of people contributing patches, fixing bugs and providing support - how do we take advantage of that energy in a way that is most beneficial? How does Panopoly grow up and evolve?

Personally, I think adding some new co-maintainers (from the community) who can help add more resources to the project is the answer.

But I really just want to start the discussion and see what everyone thinks! Thanks!