If you have been contributing to a project that is already hosted in cvs.gnome.org and the module maintainer approves it, you may request for an account in the GNOME CVS repository. That way you can commit your patches directly.
Also, you may have a number of scattered patches to several GNOME modules and people may have put you on their hit list of "good hacker". This is common for people who have been fixing bugs in GNOME here and there, and such people are very good candidates for CVS access.
Translators who are making frequent changes and updates to translations may be granted a CVS account. In any case, you should contact the coordinator of your language team so that there is no duplicated effort for translations.
Finally, you may have a GNOME program that you have written and you may want to have it hosted in the GNOME CVS repository. If the accounts committee and generally the people on the gnome-hackers mailing list agree that your program is a major contribution to GNOME, you may get access to the CVS repository to put your program there.
Having a CVS account implies certain responsibilities, because you are modifying the master copy of the GNOME source code. Please read the GNOME Programming Guidelines for the details.
To ensure that maintainers and project leaders know who has been granted CVS access with their blessing, please include them on the list of recipients of your CVS account request.
People with CVS accounts will automatically get a <username@cvs.gnome.org> mail alias so that they can be contacted easily in case they quickly need to fix something they did on CVS.