If you are an application developer and you want to distribute your new application for a linux distribution, then you currently have several hurdles in your path. Beyond picking which one to start with, you either have a learn a packaging format well enough that you can do the work yourself, or find someone that can do it for you.
At the early stages though neither of these options is particularly compelling. You don't want to learn a packaging format, as there is lots of code to write, and that's what you want to focus on. Finding someone to do the work for you would be great, but there are far more applications than skilled packagers, and convincing someone to help you with something larval is tough: there are going to be a lot of updates, with plenty of churn, to stay on top of, and it may be too early for them to tell if the application will be any good.
This is where pkgme comes in. This is a tool that can take care of the packaging for you, so that you can focus on writing the code, and skilled packagers can focus on packages that need high-quality packaging as they will have lots of users.
This isn't a new idea, and there are plenty of tools out there to generate the packaging for e.g. a Python application. I don't think it is a particularly good use of developer time to produce tools like that for every language/project type out there.
Instead, a few of us created pkgme. This is a tool in two parts. The first part knows about packaging, and how to create the necessary files to build a working package, but it doesn't know anything about your application. This knowledge is delegated to a backend, which doesn't need to understand packaging, and just needs to be able to tell pkgme certain facts about the application.
pkgme is now at a stage where we would like to work with people to develop backends for whatever application type you would like (Python/ Ruby On Rails/GNOME/KDE/CMake/Autotools/Vala etc.) You don't have to be an expert on packaging, or indeed on the project type you want to work on. All it takes is writing a few scripts (in whatever language makes sense), which can introspect an application and report things such as the name, version, dependencies, etc.
If this sounds like something that you would like to do then please take a look at the documentation, write the scripts, and then submit your backend for inclusion in pkgme.
You can also contact the developers, see the nascent website at pkgme.net, or visit the Launchpad page. (We are also very interested in help with the website and documentation if that is where you skills or interests lie.)