I committed contacts to the openacs-5-1 branch.
Matthew, you can ask any of the OCT people to give you CVS access.
You don't have any particular special access, but general people will expect you to manage the releases (see here for info on how to do that: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=192919), and you have some say in the direction that the development goes. Generally people will ask you before making significant changes to your code, for example.
To get the bugs assigned to you automatically, you also need to ask someone (on #openacs on IRC is a good place, or one of the OCT members) to set you up on bug-tracker, and while you're at it, you might get them to set up the cvs module for contacts, so that people can check out just that package.
