How should patches be contributed?

These are excellent questions, Rich, and we appreciate your interest in helping and warmly welcome you to become as involved as time and inspiration will allow. Here's my 6AM crack at answering...

1. Are you accepting patches at all?
Absolutely! We are doing our best to drive OSQA forward quickly, and we definitely encourage others to get involved and contribute code, documentation, ideas, publicity, etc. More is better! The project, like the site, is in "bootstrap mode" so we want the barriers to entry to be low. Give us some useful patches and get involved, and you can become a committer in a short time.

2. Would it be by asking a question on meta.osqa or should a bug be raised on Jira and the diff file attached?
Well, creating issues in Jira and attaching patches to help close issues in Jira is an excellent approach. Also, you should subscribe to the OSQA Developers List, which we have not yet relied upon sufficiently. You can send patches as attachments to messages there.

3. Should the patch be based on the SVN repository or the GIT one?
The svn repository is the official one, and the GitHub repository is now deprecated. We're trying to eliminate all the dangling references to the GitHub repo, so if you see some please let us know, and we'll fix.

4. Do you have any guidelines for contribution. Code style, unit tests etc?
There is no style guide, but I guess we'd defer to Hernâni's sense of this since he is our team's best Python/Django developer. We'll also have to investigate whether there are generally accepted Python and Django conventions. If such conventions already exist, then it might begood simply to adopt them.

Finally, if you use Jabber/GTalk, then I really encourage you to hang out in the OSQA channel whenever you can. We just idle in there, but it is a place where we can interact directly and can help others with immediate answers and insights.