Anything having to do with the worldspace, scripts, objects can be contributed as .omwaddons. They can be tested and reviewed. Once finished it can be merged into the .omwgame file.
That is the workflow I imagined. For now, having everything as .omwaddons is good enough.
As for the story, if you want to help, great!
My idea was that if we are on an Island, we have to figure out a plausible reason. Shipwrecked, amnesia, looking through wreckage for hints of himself... food bits, knife, clothes. A journal could be beside the player, big and obvious... this starts the quest chain treasure hunt to look for stuff about how you came on the island and about yourself.
Each step of the way onto the Island reveals more about yourself and your past and what happened to the crew. From there... it is open to whatever we want, a port town further up the coast and/or ruins to explore, perhaps the Island is just a small bit of something bigger that we can tap into later?
At some point, the example-suite will likely be renamed.
It will however always be a demonstration of what you can do with OpenMW and OpenMW-CS... so please, pile on the eye-candy! 
The forum is fine for keeping context across time-zones. People can't always be on IRC at the same time. Redmine is the tracker so that people can see who is working on what and if they can work on something that no one else is working on.
At this point, we urgently need a fully rigged and animated 'body' in NIF. We currently have moon-boy which allows us to work, but it isn't long term.
