I totally agree with your vision of collecting new items.
Actually before starting this "wider philosophical point"
I should have mentioned first that I started getting interested in and making use of TOSEC's database some year back between 2007 and 2010 (cannot exactly remember when, as I am getting old now...). What I do remember is that 10 or 15 years ago, collecting artefacts for retro-platforms mainly consisted of collecting old (i.e. already finalized, produced, and published) software items. Although items such as "homebrew" games and stuff already existed at that time, one would generally notice that in many cases, their developers used to make them available for downloads as a finite count of releases for which you could find simple corresponding download links on the developer's home pages or in some dedicated forums where they were active. Therefore, as I undertsand it, even homebrew artefacts could be reasonably considered and collected as regular retro-roms. This (and I am coming to the above discussion), may differ from nowadays' situation where it seems (am I wrong?) that a growing number of individuals are getting interested in retrogaming (and in retrocomputing), some of them now starting to produce not only homebrew stuff but new pieces of software, using modern SCMS to manage, maintain their source codes and/or publish versioned artefacts. Therefore, going a little bit beyond the sole scope of github repos used to maintain such code, I was simply poiting out that concerning such pieces of software, TOSEC workers maybe now be facing a growing number of situations where they have to collect WIP artefacts, and that collecting such items may require different (or modified) principles in order to avoid a situation where TOSEC would somehow become a registration annex of the SCMS (Git, CVS, SVN, etc.) used to manage such pieces of software.
From your explanation, I could read you have a clear and neat vision of the collecting principles to be applied.
Concerning a more formal involvment in the project, I am affraid this is not possible at this time, as I am the slave of my own ongoing projects. Nevertheless, since you seem to appreciate my contributions for the dats, you can count on my future contributions anytime some information should be reported to you and if required, on any technical investigation I may be in a position to perform to accelerate the correction process.
Kind regards,
Chown
