Have you been engaging with the non-Sun Java SE platform communities such as Apache Harmony, GNU Classpath, IcedTea, and Kaffe?
The Java developer ecosystem has a lot of very smart, experienced, community-savvy people who are passionate about the platform and eager to help. The OpenJDK Community in the past year has been fortunate to see the active and enthusiastic participation of these developers, who have offered up not just ideas and comment, but code and hard work, to move the project forward and address the most important issues, like encumbrances and packaging. The list of contributors is now too long to call out here individually, but if you want to see who is a part of the community, just look at the archives for the discussion mailing lists at http://openjdk.java.net.
