I just noticed that ALL the Jira issues are assigned to a single owner. I don't believe that all these issues are being worked at the moment, also, if you put yourself in the shoes of a external contributor trying to find issues that he can help the community, it seems that there is nothing available that he could help.
IMO, it would be better to leave these issues unassigned, until someone is actually working on them, so that there are opportunities for others to come and help. Also, it would be good to have some easy tasks available that can be used for contributors that want to get started contributing to the project. Thanks -- Luciano Resende http://people.apache.org/~lresende http://twitter.com/lresende1975 http://lresende.blogspot.com/
