As long as the technical side isn't resolved, it might help to encourage people to hand out co-maintainership freely.

It might help to have a wiki (or some such) where you can offer upload privileges, and list TODO items. For example I'm happy to help with Unicode handling of pure-perl modules. I'd just scan that list once a week, and see if there's something interesting. And when I work with a module anyway, I can just as well apply a few simple patches that live in the RT.

Or I could just notice a module I'm familiar with, and accept co-maintainership to to decrease the response times to bug reports and patches.

My experience with the pugs repository are very encouraging. We hand out commit bits very freely (when somebody say "I found a typo in file $file", the answer is usually "should I fix it, or do you want a commit bit?"), and so far haven't had any problems with vandalism or very poor commits.

In any case I think it's important to try to lower the entry barrier for contribution to CPAN modules. Maybe somebody wants to write a Meditation on that matter (to increase visibility and to have a better title)?