Jim,
Did not catch you on irc, but you might want to study the git-related workflow documents maintained and used by the Mono community (they just recently migrated from svn to git on github).
http://www.mono-project.com/GitFAQ
http://help.github.com/pull-requests/
It is a workflow scheme which leans itself towards your notion of "gatekeepers" (i.e., github pull requests and patch queues posted to community channels). In addition, they offer documentation from the perspective of different contributor roles.
//stefan
