Priorities for development release maintenance

The Ubuntu Engineering team in Canonical is committing a rotation of developers to work solely on development release maintenance for a month or two at a time, with the goal of keeping the development release buildable, installable, and upgradeable at all times in order to allow other developers to work with fewer interruptions. What should our priorities be? How should we organise ourselves? Given the alignment between this and e.g. the historical activities of MOTU, how can we build community participation or link into existing activities?