Participation in Cabal / Hackage development

All, I just mentioned ideas for Cabal 2 but I should also like to talk about how we can go about increasing participation in the development effort. We currently have nearly 200 open tickets which include many important bugs and no shortage of good ideas for useful new features. Our limiting factor is developer time. Most of us use the Cabal / Hackage system in one way or another. Most of us are familiar with its annoyances and limitations. Unfortunately the number of people helping out has dropped rather in the past year or so. Perhaps we should run a little poll like the darcs hackers did to find out what we could do to increase participation so we can get on with building the tools that we all want, but a bit more quickly. Duncan