I have been thinking hard about my role with fink. I started using fink back in 2002 or so and became a member of sourceforge (user: goatbar) in Sept 2003. I really enjoy the community around fink. While I don't believe I've actually ever met any one else on the project with a commit bit, I feel welcome to just jump into the IRC any time. I've gotten to talk to and collabrate with many interesting folks.
However, when I'm out in real space, I generally get neutral to negative responses back from people about fink. "Oh, it didn't do X back many years ago, so I gave up on it." Where X is usually something really easy to add or fix. I have offered to mentor many people, but I have managed to recruit 0 people to long term package work. It's really not that hard and unlike most other packaging systems, fink puts the how to compile everything right there on your computer. But with the general lack of positive feedback on fink and my drifting away from Mac OSX coding (I spend most of my day on Linux either directly or on virtual machines), I haven't put much into fink this year.
For a long time, I've wanted to get better at packaging for Ubuntu and work more on the upstream packages themselves. If anyone is up for mentoring me through the packaging process, please contact me. I'd be interested in helping out on the the GIS packages. I also really would like to get MB-System setup to properly build as a Ubuntu package (that means shared libraries).