I hope this will be a topic in Rennes though I won't be there. Savannah is nice but limited in scope (and notably does not provide 100% uptime).
The E-mail patch system is archaic and is certainly noisy. I think we should have an additional system that is more friendly. I use github a lot to collaborate, and while it is not acceptable to a GNU project (mostly because it is closed source), it certainly proves to have good functionality and improves collaboration. Also, I think reviewers should become mentors - i.e., help rather than be only critical. The current system is unfriendly, though it appears to be hard to appreciate that problem from the 'inside'. The main problem appears to be we have too few reviewers to make them mentors... I am not contributing my work as it stands. Maybe my contributions do not matter in the greater scheme of things - but, believe me, I am not happy about it. I just updated a critical bug in OpenBLAS and bumped scipy and numpy in production. Someone else will have to do that work over again. Maybe some people here can form a working group and come up with recommendations? Pj.
