At our user group meeting this week, after encouraging our BIG Idea Lab hosts, Red Rokk Interactive, to contribute back some of their nifty video-mixing code to Drupal, the subject came up of how new contributed modules (or "projects") are vetted.
I was pretty sure there was a high level of community review, but as a non-contributor myself I wasn't sure exactly how it worked. Then researching something this morning, I stumbled on a tool that contributed module developers can use to review the code in their contributions: http://ventral.org/pareview. Then I thought I'd poke around and find some more resources for potential contributors. There are a lot!
Basic developer guide:
http://drupal.org/contribute/development
New contributed code starts out as a "sandbox" project, where it is vetted by the community. In order to be promoted to a full project, it has to pass through this phase and get through an approval process. (As was mentioned in the discussion, a lot of this process has to do with whether the proposed project is already covered by an existing project -- based on the philosophy that the Drupal ecosystem is based on collaboration, not competition.)
The question also came up of how Drupal documentation could be improved with examples. (Very true!) So for those with a hankering for example-filled Drupal docs, there are ways to work on that problem too.
Contribute to documentation:
http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation
Dig in, folks!