At LinuxCon Japan a few weeks ago I gave a talk entitled, “Linux Kernel Maintainers, What they do and how you can help them.”
The video of the talk is now online here if you want to see what I said, and the full slides, and text of what I said can be found in the presentation’s repository.
If you have ever wondered why a maintainer of an open source project could be a bit grumpy about anything you have sent them, I strongly suggest you go read the notes I wrote for that talk, or the slides, which includes all speaker notes.