Taken from Juanco's post of the CVS guideline, I propose we start here and change as needed:
People who want checkin access are first requested to send patches and have them reviewed by a developer. If they submit some good ones (preferably over a period of time, to demonstrate sustained interest), then one of the developers can ask the dunit-developers mailing list whether it is OK to make this person a developer (after first sending the prospective developer a copy of this file and then having the prospective developer say they want to be a developer). If there are no objections, the person will be made a developer.