Maintenance here means the same thing as what we meant for the maintainership pilot for the most part. The part that I think is not surprising but is an expansion of meaning is that it should include any necessary upgrades as a part of the work the maintainer would be responsible for. Historically, this has been led by 2U but as more and more repos are not by default editable by 2U, this approach makes less sense.
I’m not sure about restricting access or rules conformity. My thought is that anyone willing to step up to maintain a project that needs maintenance is essentially asking for CC access along with taking on some accountability. My goal is to expand access to more people who can do the work of maintaining things. If we find that people are abusing their commit rights to work against building a long term maintainable project, we should handle those on a case by case basis but I think that is a related but separate problem from making sure we have a good public maintenance process.